Volume 45, Number 9 · May 28, 1998
Angels of LA
By John Gregory Dunne
OTHER BOOKS MENTIONED IN THIS ARTICLE
His Eminence of Los Angeles
by Monsignor Francis J. Weber
St. Francis Historical Society, 707 pp., $35.00
The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory
by Norman M. Klein
Verso, 330 pp., $18.00
Catholic Bishops
by John Tracy Ellis
Michael Glazier/The Liturgical Press, 182 pp., $8.95 (paper)
American Catholic: The Saints and Sinners Who Built America's Most Powerful Church
by Charles R. Morris
Times Books, 511 pp., $27.50
The Powers That Be
by David Halberstam
(out of print), 1,071 pp.
James Francis Aloysius McIntyre, Roman Catholic archbishop (and eventually cardinal) of Los Angeles between 1948 and 1970, is remembered today, if at all, as a cartoon of an ecclesiastical tyrant. It was McIntyre's misfortune to be an old man, although more or less a vigorous one, when the winds of change stirred by Pope John XXIII and Vatican Council II whistled through the Church. Over forty years a priest, set in his ways and satisfied with Catholicism's existing chain of command, McIntyre was not happy about changes in the Church. What he did not think broke, he did not want fixed, and he had the will to thwart those given both to fixing and, worse, to suggesting a degree of clerical independence and priestly collegiality that he would regard as a challenge to his governance.
Review, 7158 words
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