Harry John was not your average American Catholic - Cover Story

National Catholic Reporter, Sept 17, 1993 by Paul Wilkes

But the Miller Brewery heir showed how exotic life can get when religion and money mix

Waiting to pay their respects to the family of the deceased and pass by his open casket, the mourners stood in a long line that reached through the huge main doors of Gesu Church and stretched out into the bitterly cold night in Milwaukee last December. By any measure, it was an extraordinary gathering, the Rorschach of Harry John's life.

There were teenage Vietnamese Dominican novices with simple wooden crucifixes around their necks and Scheinstott nuns in starched headpieces; black Carthusian monks in coarse brown robes and liberal Jesuits in sports clothes; liberation theologians and those unwavering in their allegiance to the Vatican. Members of Milwaukee's wealthiest families stood amid maids and janitors, Cistercian abbots, American Indians, former drug addicts, the past and present homeless. All had come to say good-bye.

John, 73, lying in state at the front of the church -- dressed in a dark suit and red tie, his usually gaunt face uncharacteristically filled out by a solicitous undertaker -- had died three days before. In death, he had guaranteed one last measure of the controversy he had generated -- or perhaps cultivated -- in the latter years of his life. An heir to half the Miller Brewing fortune, John had used his enormous wealth to create the largest Catholic charity in the world, the De Rance Foundation.

As a younger man, he had quietly funded such varied projects as leprosariums in India and camps for Milwaukee inner-city blacks. His money dug wells in drought-stricken West Africa and provided seminary training in the Philippines.

But as the years passed, Harry John became bewitched by less noble projects; he flamboyantly spent millions in searches for sunken ships supposedly laden with treasure, and poured tens of millions of dollars into a religious television network that never quite got on the air. His own religious convictions narrowed. Eventually only the most rigidly orthodox Catholic individuals, institutions and causes needed bother to apply.

John's wild spending on treasure ships and the television network eventually forced his wife, Erica, and Donald Gallagher, his longtime aide at the foundation, to bring him to court and to wrest control of De Rance's ever-diminishing funds from him.

But in death, Harry John had planned his final vindication. With his signature at the bottom of a single sheet of paper a few years before, he had created another foundation, Southern Cross, which was to receive all the remaining assets of De Rance at his passing.

One of the mourners stopped in front of the widow and warmly took both of her hands in his own. After John Miller offered his condolences, what appeared to be a small smile crept onto his face. Both the touch and even the hint of a smile struck Erica John as odd. Miller, a Milwaukee attorney, had barely acknowledged her presence during the 10 years he had served as legal counsel to De Rance, arrogantly brushing by her in the hallways of the foundation's headquarters on West Blue Mound Road as if she were no more than office help.

But there was reason for Miller to smile. Miller was one of five directors of the putative Southern Cross Foundation, which then exited only on that single sheet of paper bearing John's over-sized signature. But upon his death -- the biblical seed going to the soil -- Southern Cross would spring forth to promulgate John's Vatican-correct perception of Catholicism.

At last accounting, the De Rance Foundation had $100 million in assets -- funds that Miller and his fellow Southern Cross directors were now poised, after years of waiting, to have at their disposal.

"Thank you," Erica John said, not adding the coda she had delivered in most of these brief encounters: that Harry had died in peace; after everything, his had been a holy death.

God wants us to marry

On a summer's day in 1952, Harry John positioned Erika Nowotny in front of the Maderna fountain in St. Peter's Square in Rome and released the shutter of his Leica. They had met a few days before. Harry, 33, was in Rome to photograph religious art for his Sacred Pictures Co. of Milwaukee, which produced church calendars, holy pictures and high-quality reproductions. Erica, 20, an Austrian born in Rome, was pursuing classical studies there and a mutual friend thought their artistic interests were so close that they should meet.

It took a year for Harry John to send Erica the picture. After another year of correspondence, he persuaded Erica to come help him with Sacred Pictures. Harry proposed. Erica said no. She did not know him well enough. They worked side by side in the religious art business for the next year, Harry insisting, "God wants us to get married."

Their wedding in 1956 was as unusual as Harry's funeral would eventually be. Harry had single-handedly funded a summer camp for black inner-city youngsters; he and Erica had been its directors and chief counselors. When the youngsters learned of the wedding, many wanted to take part. So there, on the pages of The Milwaukee Journal, the scion of the Miller Brewing family and his new bride were led down the aisle by 15 black attendants, 6 and 7 years old, wearing white gloves and carrying red corsages.