Bouquet

"Holy Father, permit the celebration of the next Eucharistic Congress to take place in Chicago and I promise you a million communions as a spiritual bouquet to your august presence." So spoke His Eminence, George William Cardinal Mundelein to His Holiness, Pope Pius XI, nearly two years ago. Fiat!--and the well-beloved Cardinal, who also is His Grace the Archbishop of Chicago, set himself to gathering (there is no culling in Roman Catholicism of the present day) his flowers of faith--gorgeous roses dewed with the jewels of eminence, lowly poppies jeweled with repentent tears, episcopal orchids and unseen violets, flowers of the field and of city back lots, posies of the little windowbox and plants grown resplendent in the conservatory of religion. The ingathering is almost complete this wek. A million Roman Catholics, purified in soul by weeks and months of frequent communion, are setting their mundane affairs in order. Three weeks hence, June 20-24, they will be assembled in Chicago and looped with the bonds of Catholic ceremony. Then will waft about the world, to the Pope willingly immured in Rome, a mighty odor of sanctity. It will be the greatest public demonstration of. faith ever witnessed by any religion. It will be the greatest concourse of the devout ever gathered in one community.

Eucharistic Congress. No treasure is too great for Roman Catholics to pour out in their honoring of Christ. Kings brought rich gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh to the Infant. Mary Magdalene brought to Him her alabaster box of precious ointments and broke it at His feet in her repentance. Cathedrals have gone up in magnificent pomp for the housing of the Host. All have been for the honoring of Christ in the Eucharist.

In 1881 a new method of honoring Christ was devised at Lille, France. Bishop Gaston de Segur inspired his people to a public demonstration of their faith. This first public celebration was only local with relatively few adherents. But even so, the open air parading of the Host was dramatic. The idea spread, was dramatized the next year at Avignon, France. In 1888 the VI Eucharistic Congress met at Paris and centred its pomp and circumstance about the Church of the Sacred Heart,* whence one overlooks all of grey Paris and beyond towards Chartres. Many a great city has seen these congresses -- Antwerp, Jerusalem (where was stimulated co-operation between the Eastern and Western churches), Rheims (where church deliberations concerned social questions affecting the working classes), Paray-le-Monial (the city of the Sacred Heart), Brussels, Lourdes (the city of Eucharistic miracles), Angouleme (where French law was invoked to block the now regular procession of the Blessed Sacrament), Rome, Metz (where the Germans suspended the law of 1870 to permit the procession), London.** The XXI Eucharistic Congress was held in 1910 at Montreal close to the faith-healing shrine of Ste. Anne de Beaupre. This was a stupendous meeting of 750,000 pilgrims. But it was too far from the great centres of U. S. Catholicism to spread the full effects of its potentialities.

The XXVIII Eucharistic Congress comes to Chicago for a pentad of ecstasy the third week of June. Hundreds of thousands, at least a million, pilgrims will come. Lake boats and hotels and Pullman cars fitted with altars will transform themselves into ephemeral churches. Every Catholic family in the city has prepared itself to care for guests. So far as possible, foreigners (for thousands will come from abroad) will be housed with co-nationalists. The clergy will bunk in rectories--and in hotels. Honest innkeepers and food-purveyors have promised to maintain their regular charges.

Flowers. The multitudes will come--the humble followers of Christ in Catholicism and their equally humble leaders in Christ. All nations are sending their prayers (Hungary has already offered 1,000,000 communions), are sending their pilgrims--laymen, priests, canons, monsignori, bishops, archbishops, archimandrites, primates, cardinals. Fifteen cardinals (princes of the Church) will take part in the deliberations and the rites. They and their fellow ecclesiastics of lesser rank will form the greatest body of Church dignitaries ever to meet outside of Rome.

Bees. There will be not the slightest taint of commercialism about this Congress. From the town of Mundelein and the now sacred neighborhood of the Seminary of St. Mary of the Lake, peddlers of souvenirs will be rigorously excluded. The pilgrims will each be given an official bronze medal. Last week a ton of them came from Rome.

Naturally there will be mercantile proboscides dipping here and there, gleaning a little honey for the sweetening of the pots. The pilgrims will need socks and smelling salts and all such things. But Chicago prices will not be boosted.

Not directly commercial is an exposition of religious and educational equipment now being assembled at the Hotel Sherman.

The Framework. The framework for this mighty nosegay of faith which the celebrating Catholics will offer to Christ through His bride, their Church, is being created at Mundelein, 111., and at Chicago.

The civil authorities of Chicago have already put the city's children to work cleaning up back yards and alley ways. The finance committee of the city council has approved plans for a Court of Honor,an alley of festooned, illuminated white posts. After the Lord has enjoyed His bouquet, Chicago, always practical, will utilize this posted promenade to do honor to a convention of Elks and another of Moose.

At the tip end of the great Municipal Pier, which jetties out nearly a mile into the lake from a base not far from Holy Name Cathedral (the archiepiscopal seat) is a domed exposition hall where will be placed objects of religious veneration and admiration--relics of saints, holy pictures, chalices of antique manufacture and unique design, vestments worn by prelates who have made Catholic history, a replica of the skin and birchbark chapel where in 1674 Father Jacques Marquette (1637-75) celebrated the first Chicago Mass before a band of Indians, mission artifacts.

To the south of the pier and adjacent to cruciform Field Museum is Soldiers' Field Stadium, capable of holding nearly 200,000 spectators on terraced seats and in oval field. In the field, church carpenters are constructing a sanctuary 224 feet long and 214 feet wide. This will have priedieus, or kneeling benches, for the more than 500 archbishops and bishops, who will attend in copes and mitres and bearing croziers. Fifteen cardinals robed in ecclesiastical red and attended by papal knights and lay dignitaries, whose clothes will be of festive cloth of gold proper for such an occasion, will assist at the Masses in Soldiers' Field. The cardinals will have their red-canopied thrones flanking a huge altar.

This altar will be of stucco on a platform 30 feet above the ground. At its pinnacle, above its gilded canopy, will tower the cross, 125 feet from earth. The cardinals with their gleaming attendants will mount to this altar by 24 broad steps leading up from three sides. Flowers for the altar will come from the home and school gardens of Chicago's Catholic children. Loud speakers will carry the words of the Mass to the multitudes.

Still another framework mounts magnificently for Cardinal Mundelein's spiritual bouquet to the Holy Father. This is at Mundelein, Ill.*** Hundreds of men have been working here all winter landscaping the grounds of the Seminary of St. Mary of the Lake. They have constructed in a little valley a grotto in replica of the one at Lourdes in southwest France. They have installed the Twelve Stations of the Cross. They have built miles of roads, five bridges over the indented shoreline of the lake. They have wreathed the seminary, the dormitories, the little chapel, in trees and shrubberies and lawns. They have mounted on a pedestal 20 feet square a marble shaft 62 feet high. Surmounting the pillar is a 12-foot bronze statue of the Virgin Mary standing on a globe to symbolize her supposed exalted position over the world. Bronze images of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John support the globe.

At the entrance to the seminary grounds will be an altar with thrones and sanctuary similar to the one at Soldiers' Field in Chicago.

"Little Flower of Jesus." The relics of St. Therese, the "Little Flower of Jesus," have just been brought to Chicago from Liseux, France, where she lived.**** The relics include a crucifix made from the rosebush from which, during her convent life, she daily plucked roses to place before the statue of the Infant Jesus. Other relics are several locks of her hair, her dust, a piece of the habit in which she died, a piece of another habit in which she was buried, a piece of the coffin in which she was interred before her exhumation in 910 and a large piece of her arm bone.

The Full Bouquet. The full savor of the million flowers of faith that Cardinal Mundelein is offering to his Supreme Pontiff will rise the last day of the Congress, Thursday June 24. The million pilgrims of all degrees will move themselves to the town of Mundelein to garland that jewel of Catholicism with their final public demonstration./- The million will proceed in processional through the miles of the seminary walks, past the Stations of the Cross. There never before was pomp like this in the U. S.

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."

He is a quick thinker and a good diplomat. When he wants the co-operation of a body of his people he makes them feel, without actual declaration, that they are the most willing workers in the world. When his people fall below his high expectations he scolds them with archiespiscopal paternity. Chicago has never refused him a request. And his requests have been practical commands made with the warm assurance of his archiepiscopal rights and duties.

The Bride's Proxy. Cardinal Mundelein's spiritual bouquet will be carried to the Supreme Pontiff of the Catholic Church by His Eminence, Giovanni Cardinal Bonzano, sent as the Pope's legate. In selecting the legate to this XXVIII Eucharistic Congress, the Pope experienced much embarrassment, for few of the cardinals on duty about the Vatican colleges can speak English and of those who can some might irritate U. S. Catholics. The Church, besides promulgating its faith, must also deal with peoples, must induce them to cooperate toward the holy aims. Thus Cardinal Merry del Val, who speaks English well, is persona non grata to Cardinal Mundelein, according to all reports. When (1912-1922) Cardinal, then Bishop, Bonzano was Apostolic Delegate and Apostolic Visitor Extraordinary to the U. S., some quiet friction developed between him and Cardinal O'Connell of Boston. But Cardinal Bonzano has ever been par excellence the diplomat, the smoother of difference. He brought the U. S. heirarchy to work with him.

*A decorative motif of this magnificent parish church is the Shield of David, a phenomenon which amazes Jews.

**This congress, in 1908, was most important, being not only the first held in an English-speaking country, but also opening the way for the first appearance on British soil in more than 350 years of a legate from the Pope. Vincenzo Cardinal Vannutelli was that legate (he is still alive), and with him were six other cardinals, 14 archbishops, 70 bishops and a host of priests. Proceedings were magnificent. British Catholics hailed this congress as the flower and fruit of the "Second Spring." But they were saddened by the protest and public clamor raised by the societies composing the Protestant Alliance. The Alliance prevented the public parading of the Blessed Sacrament.

***This small and thriving town lies north of Chicago, toward Milwaukee and eight miles inland from Lake Michigan. Nine paved highways now reach toward it. But until very recently it was a disappointment to its townspeople. They hoped that its proximity to Chicago would bring it a real estate boom. The boom came not. So the citizens changed the town's name like the rebaptism of an unfortunate child. Still no boom. So they rechristened it. Still barrenness. Then 15 years ago along came a teacher of salesmanship who re-named it Area (the initials of Ability, Reliability, Endurance and Action). But the bird of the dollar brought no good omen. Finally Cardinal Mundelein, as Archbishop of Chicago, bought 1,200 acres there, including a beautiful little lake, and gave the place its present name of Mundelein. Here he has started on a $10,000,000 building program, having already established the Seminary of St. Mary of the Lake, the largest Catholic seminary in the U. S.

****She was born in 1873; died in 1879 canonized in 1925.

/-The throngs going to Mundelein will be so vast that two new railroad stations have been built at the town site. Chicago trains expect to convey 300,000 people traveling with two-minute headway. (This will be the greatest crowd ever handled by railroads in one day. In 1901 the Great Eastern Railway of England carried 200 -000 to King Edward VII's coronation, the previous record.) The railways will place 600 special guards at crossovers. Several hundred employes of the Cook County forest preserve will watch cross-roads and dispense bedding, fuel and cooking utensils at the many camp sites provided for the touring pilgrims. Auto-repair gangs will patrol the roads. First aid stations will minister to the stricken.

/-/-His birthplace at 65 Avenue C, Manhattan, is now surrounded by raggedy shops.