Religion: Eight New Hats

Busy, ancient (78) Pope John XXIII acted again last week to strengthen the Curia—administrative headquarters of the Roman Catholic Church—which has suffered in recent years from understaffing and old age. For Dec. 14 the Pope called a consistory (his second) at which eight new cardinals will be created, raising the membership of the Sacred College to 79, the largest in history.

Two of the new cardinals will be U.S. citizens, bringing U.S. membership in the college to an alltime high of six—ranking in number of cardinals third (after France with seven and ahead of Spain's five). Italy will have 31 Italians in the college, as opposed to 48 non-Italians.

One of the Americans had been virtually sure to get a red hat: Archbishop Albert Gregory Meyer, 56, appointed last September to succeed Chicago's late Samuel Cardinal Stritch as head of the largest Catholic archdiocese in the U.S. (1,942,000 members). Shy, scholarly Archbishop Meyer, son of a Milwaukee grocer, is known as a brilliant administrator and a cautious interviewee—on his appointment to Chicago he refused to say whether he would transfer his allegiance from the Milwaukee Braves to the Chicago Cubs. Met by a crowd of newsmen and clerics at a Chicago airport last week, as he returned from Washington, Meyer chomped his chewing gum vigorously. "Of course, I am happy for myself," he said, "but I am even happier for the people of Chicago. We must be even more dedicated now." Archbishop Meyer is expected to be the only one of the new cardinals who will not be assigned to the Curia in Rome. The second American to get a red hat was also born and bred in Milwaukee; Aloysius Joseph Muench, 70, the first U.S. citizen to be an accredited diplomatic representative of the Vatican. Pope Pius XII made him apostolic visitor to Germany in 1946, raised him to archbishop in 1950 and apostolic nuncio in 1951. As the first foreign diplomat to present his credentials to the German Federal Republic in 1951, stocky, grey-haired Archbishop Muench became dean of the Bonn diplomatic corps. His easy charity and folksy Midwestern humor have made him popular. Once when Chancellor Adenauer admired a purple cape he was wearing, Muench said: "I'll see that you get something purple," promptly delighted the Chancellor with a necktie made of the same material.

Other red hats will go to:

MONSIGNOR WILLIAM THEODORE HEARD, 75, a convert from the Church of Scotland (as a 26-year-old lawyer) to Catholicism, who will be the first Scottish cardinal since the death of Charles Cardinal Erskine in 1811. "He may also," speculated the London Times, "be the first Oxford rowing Blue in the history of the Church to achieve the purple." Since 1927 Heard has served at the Vatican on the Sacred Roman Rota, the high ecclesiastical court that passes on applications for marriage annulments. The Vatican expects Pope John to make use of Monsignor Heard's legal abilities in preparing for the forthcoming Ecumenical Council.