Former Washington Cardinal James Hickey dies at 84

National Catholic Reporter, Nov 5, 2004

Cardinal James Hickey, the soft-spoken former archbishop of Washington and one of only 14 U.S. cardinals, died Oct. 24 after a lengthy illness. He was 84.

Hickey was named to the prominent archdiocese by Pope John Paul II in 1980 and made a cardinal in 1988. He retired in 2000 as a non-voting member of the College of Cardinals and the nation's second-eldest cardinal. He never had the opportunity to vote for a new pope in a conclave.

"The death of Cardinal Hickey is poignant for the church of Washington and a personal loss for me," said Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, who succeeded Hickey and was at his bedside when he died. "Although he carried a heavy cross of illness during the past few years, his courage and faith continued to be a great inspiration to us all."

Vincentian Fr. David M. O'Connell, president of The Catholic University of America, said Hickey was always a "good shepherd" and noted that as chancellor of the university, a post he automatically held as Washington's archbishop, the cardinal helped strengthen the "bishops' university [as it] entered the new millennium."

Outwardly he was a quiet, soft-spoken man of faith, but behind the scenes Hickey was a tireless worker and skilled administrator who built networks of church and community partnerships to serve the poor and to provide better educational opportunities for children.

Just prior to his transfer to Washington in 1980, Hickey attended the funeral, of assassinated Archbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador. The archdiocese's tie with that region became even stronger when in December of that year, laywoman Jean Donovan and Ursuline Sr. Dorothy Kazel--whom Hickey as bishop of Cleveland had commissioned to serve as missionaries in El Salvador--were murdered along with two other American churchwomen in that war-torn land.

In his small chapel, the Washington prelate always kept photos of his murdered friends as a reminder of how they gave their lives to serve the poor, and he became an outspoken critic of the Salvadoran government.

When he was named Washington's new archbishop in 1980, succeeding Cardinal William Baum, challenges that Hickey would face--and develop outreach for--in the years ahead included rising homelessness, a growing elderly population and a need for new parishes and schools as the area's increasingly diverse population grew steadily in outer regions of the metropolitan area.

Under his watch, Catholic Charities of Washington became the region's largest provider of social services, and he launched a nonprofit agency to provide housing to the elderly.

"We serve the homeless not because they are Catholic, but because we are Catholic," he once said. "If we don't care for the sick, educate the young, care for the homeless, then we cannot call ourselves the church of Christ."

To many, Hickey--fiercely loyal to Rome--will be remembered as strict disciplinarian. Hickey was instrumental in Ft. Charles Curran's ouster from The Catholic University. Rome had been deeply suspicious of Curran, a tenured professor of moral theology, since his high profile opposition to Humanae Vitae in 1968 and as a later critic of church teachings on sexual ethics.

In 1986, after years of Vatican scrutiny and investigation the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith declared Curran "no longer suitable or eligible" to teach Catholic theology at The Catholic University, where Hickey was chancellor. Curran Currently is the Elizabeth Scurlock University Professor of Human Values at Southern Methodist University.

Hickey had "no choice," he said, but to advocate for Curran's dismissal.

Hickey was an unflagging opponent of New Ways Ministry, a Catholic advocacy group for homosexuals, founded in 1981 in Washington by School Sister of Notre Dame Jeannine Gramick and Salvatorian Fr. Robert Nugent. In 1984, the Vatican, acting at Hickey's urging, ordered Gramick and Nugent to quit New Ways. They obeyed, but continued their ministry to gay and lesbian Catholics independently. When New Ways organized a national symposium in 1985, Hickey urged sponsoring groups to pull out and wrote to every U.S. bishop urging them to forbid attendance.

Following formal legal proceedings within the church, and due in no small part to Hickey's persistence, the pair was barred permanently from their pastoral work in 1999 by order of the Vatican.

"I don't get any joy out of those kinds of situations," Hickey told NCR in 1999. "If I didn't see it as my duty, I would probably try to sidestep.

"To me, the unifying force is the church," he said. "I personally believe in the church. I never doubted what she taught."

It was a keen sense of duty to the teachings of the church that led Hickey to oppose the "Catholic Common Ground Project" introduced by Chicago Cardinal Joseph Bernardin and the National Pastoral Life Center in New York in 1996. The effort drew condemnation from Hickey: "We cannot achieve church unity by accommodating those who dissent from church teaching."

James Aloysius Hickey was born in 1920 in Midland, Mich., and entered the seminary at age 13. He was ordained in 1946 and went on to earn two doctorates from prestigious seminaries in Rome. In 1967, he was named auxiliary bishop of Saginaw, Mich., and then served as rector of the Pontifical North American College in Rome from 1969 to 1974.