Francis E. George, Chicago’s new Roman Catholic archbishop, will be greeted with elaborate ceremonies and rituals stretching on for days, but it takes only two small acts–one ecclesiastical, one civil–to give him control of the nation’s second-largest diocese.
In the eyes of the church, George will become the leader of more than 2.3 million Catholics in Cook and Lake Counties on May 7 when a letter of appointment from Pope John Paul II is read to a group of priests known as the College of Consultors, which has interim authority over the archdiocese.
Later, probably that day, a judge also will swear George in as “the Catholic bishop of Chicago, a corporation sole,” a secular title bestowed by a special 1861 act of the legislature.
Legally, it turns him into a one-man board of directors for a $667 million-a-year conglomerate of churches, schools, charities and other operations that employs some 19,000 people.
Both are simple formalities, done in a few minutes, requiring neither incense nor church bells.
How George chooses to celebrate his installation will speak volumes about the newcomer’s style and priorities as he takes the reins.
When Archbishop Joseph Bernardin arrived in Chicago in 1982, the priests of the archdiocese were divided and demoralized, wracked by years of conflict with Cardinal John Cody.
Bernardin decided to have his papal letter of appointment officially read not at the usual public mass but the night before at a private prayer service for priests.
That departure, along with a warm and conciliatory homily he gave to the priests, won the new archbishop a two-minute standing ovation in the candlelight of Holy Name Cathedral and helped win the loyalty that the priests gave Bernardin throughout his 14-year tenure.
That, however, was only the first of seven installation services for Bernardin.
Ten cardinals and 150 bishops and archbishops attended mass the next day at Holy Name, while dignitaries filled the pews and hundreds of spectators crowded the streets around the cathedral.
Thousands more watched the event on television, as Bernardin received his silver-plated crozier–the curled shepherd’s staff–and sat in the archbishop’s chair for the first time.
Following that service, Bernardin moved to the auditorium of the Holy Name Cathedral School, where he was formally sworn in as the corporation sole by Harry Comerford, then-chief judge of the Cook County Circuit Court.
Bernardin went on to hold prayer services for monks, nuns and deacons. He said special masses at Polish and Hispanic parishes, attended a black-tie gala of city officials, and said an open-air mass in Grant Park for tens of thousands of Catholics before the week was out.
All the events were scripted by Bernardin, and each sent a particular message about who the new archbishop was and how he intended to operate.
Seventeen years earlier, Cody had his installation observed in a more formal fashion, arriving as the prince he felt the archdiocese’s leader should be.
Cody traveled to Chicago by train, accompanied by an entourage of 125 priests, aides and friends. The train stopped just outside of the city, where Mayor Richard J. Daley, Gov. Otto Kerner and other local officials boarded to ride the final miles with the new archbishop.
He was sworn in as corporation sole at Union Station, where he was greeted by hundreds of Chicagoans. A grand motorcade then took the archbishop to his new home, the mansion on North State Parkway.
Cody had no special prayer service for priests. He was installed during a mass at Holy Name attended, according to news accounts, by “most of the nation’s bishops.”
The mass was preceded by an outdoor procession of more than 1,000 church officials, Knights of Columbus, monks, priests and bishops.
Cody waited outside. When everybody else had entered the cathedral, the pope’s apostolic delegate to the United States read the official letter appointing Cody, who then made a grand, ceremonious entrance.
For all the pomp surrounding it, the installation of an archbishop has more administrative than theological significance.
