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In this long file of exalted spiritual triumph will come first the Catholic laity and the lesser clergy —gold bannered folk, Dominican friars in their white cassocks, Trapist and Capuchin monks in brown, Benedictines and Jesuits in black—then the resplendent, gold-draped bishops and archbishops. Homage and glory mount as the procession nears its end. Fifteen cardinals are coming, vanguard to the Host behind. Papal guards in scarlet, blue and yellow uniforms follow. Then comes, under a canopy of gold and surrounded by censor-bearing acolytes, the Blessed Sacrament. It is inclosed in its golden ostensorium, its jeweled monstrance. No less a personage may carry it than His Eminence, Giovanni Cardinal Bonzano, the legate of the Pope, the proxy for the very Church itself.
A sermon by Patrick Joseph Hayes, Archbishop of New York, and a Pontifical High Mass by another cardinal will close this present public acclaim to the Eucharist.
The Florist. The gatherer of this spiritual bouquet to Pope Pius XI and so to the Catholic Church which is the Bride of Christ, is His Eminence, George William Cardinal Mundelein.
On July 2 he will celebrate only his 54th birthday and already he is at the heights of his Catholic hierarchy—a prince of the Church. Only the Papacy rises before himin this life. But in all probability ne will never be chosen for that august post. He is too much the human being, too much the man.
Too many myriads have seen and heard and known George Wilham Mundelein. They have seen him as a Manhattan†† boy undecided whether to enter the army (his grandfather was the first Union soldier killed at Fort Sumter in the prelude to the Civil War) or to join the Catholic priesthood. They have known him at work in the Diocese of Brooklyn and in Chicago. They have heard his eloquence (he speaks several languages). They know ms gestures, his habit of forgetting names.
Altogether the Cardinal is too concrete an individual to fade into the almost mystical, almost worshiped personage immured within the Vatican.
Furthermore, he has closed his eyes to any vision of himself on the Pontifical throne. When in the spring of 1924 he received the red hat of his cardinalcy he exclaimed (TM) the ardor of his new investiture: I have reached the topmost rung of the Iadder for an ecclesiastic—the highest honor for a churchman—while still in the prime of life. I have no other ambition."
At Chicago, with its Catholic population of almost a millon and a half, his Grace, for he is Archbishop of the Archdiocese of Chicago, has full opportunity for the workings of his multiplex genius. He assumed his archiepiscopal duties at the end of 1915, having come from the auxiliary bishopric ol Brooklyn, and immediately took leadership in the religious, political, patriotic, educational and civic life of the city.
As an orator he dramatizes himself. He is the Church for his people and the Church is he There is no incongruity when he says: "And you, my people, who today become my sons and daughters, children of the great family committed to my care! The Divine Spirit sent me to be the pastor of your souls."