Kevin Starr vs. His Critics

To the Editor:

Kevin Starr’s review of the biography of Cardinal McIntyre is remarkable in more than one way. Starr has some credentials as a historian. Yet he accepts an obviously biased account--by the archivist of the diocese--with not a criticism or question. Even more remarkably, while he focuses on the conflict between the cardinal and the Immaculate Heart nuns, he tells us nothing of what this dispute was about nor of what either party to the dispute did. He assures us (on the authority of the author) that the cardinal did not order the nuns to stay in traditional habit. What, then, was all the fuss about? Apart from some snide and condescending remarks about the nuns and some ritual ‘60s bashing, he tells us nothing. Could it be that there were some more serious issues involved, and actions by the cardinal that would make him seem less the simple holy man and more the rigid and authoritarian administrator? To answer that question would require more history and less hagiography. Starr is evidently not up to it.

James M. Dunn-Smith

Los Angeles

To the Editor:

Kevin Starr’s review of Msgr. Francis Weber’s “His Eminence of Los Angeles” deserves a point-by-point critique that is missing in the review itself. By limiting my response to his treatment of the once notorious contretemps involving Cardinal McIntyre and the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart, perhaps that assertion can be illustrated.

Weber, as archdiocesan archivist, had access to documents that he chose not to use. Starr had to know this, yet he neglects to question such compromised scholarship. Factual errors and dubious interpretations in the book find their way into the review again and again.

For example, Starr repeats Weber’s assertion that the sisters’ proposed experimentation with civilian clothes was not at the heart of the cardinal’s difference with us (although he is on record as being outraged at the proposal), but does not press on to say what was at its heart. For the cardinal, our intolerable declaration was that we could no longer in conscience assign to the parochial schools young sisters who were not fully prepared to take on such a holy and demanding work.

Most startling is Starr’s report that the Immaculate Heart Community, formed in 1970 in the wake of the controversy, was unable to sustain itself. In fact, there are 170 of us today, a significant number of whom are serving the church in Catholic schools and colleges. Eight more are in the process of preparing for membership.

It’s a shame when a book review bears no resemblance to the book. It is equally a shame when a review is little more than an extended excerpt.

Helen Kelley

Los Angeles

To the Editor:

If a writer gets some of the important facts wrong about a subject, it may raise eyebrows, but when a biographer gets many significant facts wrong, it is inexcusable and calls into question other information. Such is the case with Msgr. Frances J. Weber’s biography of Cardinal McIntyre.

The names of people and places are inaccurate. Facts, assumptions and conclusions are erroneous. The Mother House of the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary was not in Montecito but 90 some miles away in Hollywood. Father Adrian van Kamp--with or without a team of psychologists--did not lead encounter groups. Cardinal McIntyre did most definitely tell the sisters they had to wear habits, which they did. (The habit issue was certainly sensationalized by the media at the time, but it was nonetheless true.) What was at stake was not who wore what, but rather, could a group of adult, educated women take charge of their own lives?

If the sisters were in “meltdown” mode in the ‘60s before their struggle with the cardinal, as Weber states and Starr repeats, how is it that 12 members of their community are now celebrating 75 years, 50 years and 25 years as members of the Immaculate Heart Community? These women are still at it--making a difference in Los Angeles as a lay community of committed persons.

To reduce the conflict between Cardinal McIntyre and the Immaculate Heart Sisters to a battle between the genders is to obfuscate and minimize the actual issues of jurisdiction and authority. I am insulted by the inaccuracies in the book and certainly wonder about the reviewer, his research and his inability to ferret out critical errors. I suspect that this is how history is rewritten. It is offensive.

Josephine Merrill Kirkpatrick

Pasadena

Kevin Starr replies:

I was flattered but somewhat disconcerted to have my review provoke such warm responses: flattered by the intense and scrutinizing readership of the correspondents, but disconcerted as well that 30 years later the obsessed critics of Cardinal McIntyre remain, like Sigourney Weaver as Warrant Officer Ripley, forever locked in battle with the alien.

I will admit to one important error in Msgr. Weber’s biography, which I repeated in my review. The Mother House of the Immaculate Heart Sisters was in Hollywood, not Montecito. Montecito was the site of the novitiate. But other than this understandable slip of the pen on Msgr. Weber’s part, I find myself amazed that three decades after the events in question and 20 years after the cardinal’s death, following a decade of service as a parish priest, a bizarre complexity of myth, deliberate fabrication and paranoid obsession still grips the surviving anti-McIntyreistas. Long after the people--in this case the people of God, as Vatican II terms them, of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles--have chosen wiser paths, aging but persistent anti-McIntyreistas yearn in their heart of hearts for the revolution to continue. As in the case of the ‘60s, they continue on their Shining Path armed with every weapon save the truth.

None of them, obviously, has read Msgr. Weber’s biography, and yet a number of them gratuitously question Msgr. Weber’s scholarship, suggesting that a Roman Catholic priest cannot write accurate history. Ironically, this was the very canard against which Weber’s mentor at Catholic University of America, the renowned historian Msgr. John Tracy Ellis, devoted his life of teaching and research to defeat. Helen Kelly, for example, the former Sister Mary William, charges that Weber “had access to documents in the [Immaculate Heart] case that he chose not to use.” She offers no evidence. She belongs, rather, to a genre of activist for whom accusation alone suffices as a mode of discourse.

Sue Welsh, for her part, charges that under McIntyre, priests of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles were “harassed, muted, transferred or in some cases driven from their vocation.” She offers no evidence--no documents--for this shopworn charge. She merely repeats the accusation, as forever remains the style of discourse in her set. On the contrary, had Welsh read Msgr. Weber’s biography, she would have learned that the archdiocese treated Father DuBay with great caution. Having called the cardinal, for whom he derived his priestly identity (and his employment), an authoritarian racist and demanded his removal, Father DuBay was not immediately suspended from the priesthood. (Imagine a similar scenario in secular employment. How long would such an offending employee last?) DuBay was, rather, reassigned from his parish in Compton to St. Boniface Church in Anaheim. There he continued his anti-McIntyre campaign, much to the stress of parishioners, who asked the cardinal that DuBay be transferred.

At this point--and only at this point--the cardinal called DuBay into his office for counseling, not suspension. The chancery then re-reassigned DuBay to be full-time chaplain at St. John’s Hospital, with residency at St. Monica’s parish, in Santa Monica. A year later, DuBay launched a campaign to unionize priests across the country. At this point, DuBay’s immediate superior, Msgr. Raymond J. O’Flaherty, operating on his own initiative (so the monsignor insisted), removed DuBay from his hospital chaplaincy. Several days later, DuBay was once again summoned to the chancery--after a full year and two fully respectable reassignments--and was only then instructed to clear his public statements with the archdiocese. DuBay refused and was only then, more than a year after his first accusation, after two parish reassignments and two formal counseling sessions in the chancery, one from McIntyre himself, suspended from the priesthood.

Such a scenario does not fit Welsh’s description of “harassed, muted, transferred or in some cases driven from their vocation.” On the contrary, it shows, in my opinion, a surprising amount of forbearance on behalf of the archdiocese extended to a priest who had smeared his bishop and caused grave scandal to the faithful.

The oft-repeated charge that the cardinal was a racist most especially offends against truth and charity. First of all, McIntyre arrived in Los Angeles only in 1948, and it is not fair to make him a dystopian poster boy for the Jim Crow culture that obtained in this city since the 1920s. (See the film “Devil in a Blue Dress” for a vivid evocation of this appalling situation, as the cardinal encountered it in 1948.) What was the cardinal’s personal attitude and archdiocesan program in the matter of race? Let former Father DuBay provide the answer. Interviewed by the conservative Catholic newspaper the Wanderer on Aug. 11, 1966, Father DuBay conceded that “Cardinal McIntyre is totally without prejudice . . . he is one of the most conscientious churchmen of our time.” Writing in the liberal Catholic on June 5, 1968, DuBay noted that the cardinal “has been tapping the surplus funds of wealthy suburban parishes for 20 years and putting millions of dollars into development of excellence in ghetto schools.” Further, DuBay continued, “the best schools in McIntyre’s system are in the ghetto.”

The impromptu and demonstrating organization CURE (which is given extensive coverage in Weber’s biography) wanted control over minority affairs in the archdiocese. The cardinal wanted minority affairs to be handled on a parish-by-parish basis. Nor was he eager to turn over a significant sector of archdiocesan affairs to a rump organization. (Just about the same time, the chancellor of the UC Berkeley, was making the same decision regarding the demands of demonstrating students.) That difference in policy does not make the cardinal a racist. We Californians--indeed, we Americans--are still struggling with the question of how to deal in a just and fair manner with minorities without balkanizing our society.

Father DuBay’s alleged quotation from a private conversation with the then apostolic delegate to the United States, Archbishop Egidio Vagnozzi, strains credibility to its outer limits. Just imagine what DuBay asks us to believe: a skilled diplomat, a graduate of the Pontifical Academy of Diplomacy, an archbishop en route to a cardinal’s red hat, breaking all protocol, defying all canons of diplomatic discourse, to castigate the ordinary of the largest archdiocese in the United States to an increasingly marginalized, alienated priest en route to laicization! In dealing with this alleged remark, let us merely consider the source.

And now for the most sensitive of all issues: Cardinal McIntyre and the Immaculate Heart Sisters. Once again, the accusation is made that the cardinal insisted that the sisters wear their habits. He did not. Several other religious communities in the archdiocese, in fact, such as the Sacred Heart Sisters, wore no habit, and the cardinal had no complaint. McIntyre’s mother did not raise a dummy. There is no percentage whatsoever for any man, even a cardinal, to tell any woman what to wear, ever. The cardinal did state, however, that he preferred that the sisters wear some kind of identifying clothing--not necessarily a traditional religious habit--in the classroom, so that Catholic children would know that they were being taught by nuns. Even here, however, as Weber conclusively proves, the cardinal turned the entire matter over to the Congregation for Religious in Rome.

James M. Dunn-Smith asks what the entire fuss was about? I suggest that he read Msgr. Weber’s book. There he will find that the cardinal was forced to reject the unilateral demand of the general government of the Immaculate Heart of Mary Community, made in June 1968, that “no sister of the Immaculate Heart will be assigned to a teaching position who does not have state certification.” Faced with the extraordinary demands of his ever-growing archdiocesan school system, the cardinal could not afford to meet such a requirement. Thirty years later, faced with a statewide campaign for small classrooms, we also are waiving certification requirements in an effort to get good teachers into the classroom.

The Immaculate Heart story, however, touches such a raw nerve, I believe, because it is at the white-hot center of the question of authority in the Roman Catholic Church and the even more troublesome question of how women should participate in that authority. Here is the source of the anger that seethes through these letters! Once again, as in his lifetime, Cardinal McIntyre is being made the scapegoat for the fact that the church, even amid the extremities of the 1960s, did not collapse in the face of ultimatums and demonstrators. The church kept faith, rather, with its age-old knowledge that ubi episcopus, ibi ecclesia: where the bishop is, there also is the church.

True, as a number of correspondents have indicated, the Immaculate Heart Community is still in existence. But where once the novitiate in Montecito rang with prayer and laughter of young women testing their vocations to the Immaculate Heart of Mary sisterhood, there are today only 170 members of the Immaculate Heart of Mary Community (down from a high of 560 in 1967), most of them elderly and retiring. Immaculate Heart College, once a jewel in the crown of Catholic higher education in this region, has long since closed its doors. Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity, by contrast, together with such other orders as the Dominican Sisters of Mission San Jose (orders which have kept a modified habit, incidentally, and have dealt with their bishops, even in disagreement, in a discreet and private manner) are experiencing a renaissance of vocations.

In vilifying their bishop, even in memory and in remaining lost in a labyrinth of resentment, falsehood and bitterness, these remnants of those troubled times deprive themselves not only of truth but peace of heart. Former Father DuBay accuses me of being pious. Well and good! I revere the ancient Roman (and Roman Catholic) virtue of pietas: which is to say, reverence for the complexity of the past and humility before the mystery of history.