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PAGE 7 — The Georgia Bulletin, October 22,1987
THE ARCHBISHOP’S confirmation schedule included every group,
no matter how small, as with this 1986 Confirmation class of five from
Christ Redeemer Mission in Dawsonville.
ALWAYS DELIGHTED with children, the archbishop was a surprise
guest on the school bus one morning in 1981 as children from Perry
Homes traveled to Camp Promise at the height of concern over miss
ing and murdered children in Atlanta.
(Continued from page 6)
archbishop told a meeting on the pastoral at the Atlanta
Archdiocesan Council of Catholic Women’s annual conven
tion in September, 1985. His father was not paid for days off
sick and there were no paid vacations or pensions.
In 1982, the archbishop was able to call upon his own ex
perience of hard times along with the demands of the
Gospel, papal encyclicals calling for a just economy, and
the challenges of Vatican II, in helping frame that letter
which urged a moral perspective in viewing the economy
from the vantage point of the poor.
Shortly before the first draft of the letter, Economic
Justice For All: Catholic Social Teaching and the U.S.
Economy, was unveiled at the annual meeting of the Na
tional Conference of Catholic Bishops in November, 1984, he
spoke of the lengthy process of its preparation in an inter
view in the Georgia Bulletin. Although the committee
began its task in November, 1980, the archbishop was added
to the group in the fall of 1982, replacing an ailing friend and
colleague, Bishop Joseph Daley.
“We’re considering the economy in terms of the dignity of
the human person,” he said in the interview. Even before
the first draft of the pastoral was released it drew critical
attention from business periodicals and some prominent
Catholic executives and business officials.
At a press conference Nov. 11,1984 as the first draft was
released in Washington, D.C., the archbishop responded to
a reporter’s suggestion that considerable progress had
been made in reducing unemployment in the past two years
with the comment that the committee believed “the
nation’s commitment to generating full employment has
been seriously eroded, if not abandoned.”
And he told a Southline interviewer in 1986 that he
remembered watching his father fight for guaranteed
work, vacation, hospitalization during the Depression and
that he believed dissension was paramount to improve
ment. “Because there were people willing to criticize the
system and improve it, people now have Social Security,
Medicare and assured pensions. These things don’t just
happen. They happen because somebody was disposed to be
constructively critical.”
In 1971, he had affirmed the Church’s support of the right
of workers to organize and called on labor unions to admit
workers into their ranks without discrimination. He made
the appeal at a press conference at which he announced
that a May Day Mass for labor would be celebrated at
Christ the King Cathedral.
One of man’s rights, he declared, “and sometimes this
can even be a duty, is to gather together in organizations
which will enable him to bargain collectively for living
wages, decent working conditions and humane hours which
will allow him to work and spend time with his family in
dignity.” He said that an integral part of the Church’s mis
sion is to speak to the needs of mankind, especially in the
area of human rights and justice.
In June, 1977, he joined with six other Southern Catholic
bishops to make an “unsolicited offer” to mediate the
14-year old dispute between J.P. Stevens Co. and the textile
workers’ union. The offer came a year after the
Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers launched a na
tionwide retail boycott of Stevens’ products to pressure the
large textile manufacturer into accepting unionization of its
49,000 workers.
The bishops’ statement stopped short of supporting the
boycott but said they were sympathetic to its goal — to
speed up the organization of Southern textile workers for
purposes of collective bargaining. They viewed this objec
tive “as being in complete harmony with traditional
Catholic social teaching.” In 1980, since no progress had
been made toward resolving the dispute, the bishops did en
dorse the boycott.
The archbishop, from the beginning of his years in Atlan
ta, was a part of the struggle to ease poverty and injustice.
While he arrived in Atlanta after the civil rights struggle
was beginning to gain results, he was aware prejudice still
existed, he told the Southline interviewer, Michelle
Kilbourne in 1986. But he also felt that the cooperation be
tween the Catholic Church and other denominations had
helped to dissipate prejudice. He was supportive, through
membership in the Christian Council of Metropolitan Atlan
ta and Atlanta’s Neighborhood Justice Center, of assistance
for the indigent and the homeless.
Betti Knott, who worked with the archbishop for eight
years as director of the central St. Vincent de Paul Society
in downtown Atlanta, said he was “incredibly supportive”
of her efforts to involve people throughout the archdiocese
in working for the poor through the night shelters at St. An
thony’s and Central Presbyterian churches, and the food
kitchens at the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception and St.
Anthony’s.
She found him to be a bishop who “enabled people to
grow, to work with a project even if it seemed far-fetched.
He was flexible enough to allow people to try. I would con
sult him and ask him if I had any doubts...He might arch an
eyebrow if I made a mistake but he never said ‘I told you
so.’ He was one of the most pastoral bishops I’ve ever en
countered. He was always there when I needed him and he
even covered for me when I made mistakes.”
In January, 1970, he barred new enrollments at all
Catholic schools in the archdiocese in an effort to support
the public school systems in their efforts to integrate. In his
statement, the archbishop said, “Many have taken or are
thinking of taking their children from the public schools, to
enter established or new private scnools — some of which
serve only as a haven from change, rather than providing a
sound program of education. We urge these people to have
confidence in their public school administrators and to
cooperate with them in every way.”
Community Relations
He served for 15 years, under four mayors, on the Com
munity Relations Commission Just this past May after he
was hospitalized, Mayor Andrew Young, speaking before
some 400 people gathered at the National Workshop for
Christian Unity at the Pierremont Plaza, termed him a
“very strong part” of the city's tradition of church leader
ship willing to work together to bring about the kingdom of
God.
The mayor went on to say he had served with the arch
bishop on the commission during the difficult days of the
civil rights struggle in the city. One of the reasons “we had
no violence in this city was because men like Archbishop
Donnellan were willing to spend time working with people
like me,” at that time a young activist “just a few months
out of jail.”
During Lent of 1981, at the height of the city’s agony over
the child murders, he urged Catholics to do special acts of
penance and self-sacrifice on the Fridays of Lent as one
way of sharing in the suffering of the times.
That same year a special collection was taken up for
Camp Promise, an archdiocesan project begun out of con
cern for the children of the neighborhoods where the
murders had occurred. The summer day care, coordinated
by Sister Margaret McAnoy, I.H.M., mobilized volunteers
from parishes throughout the archdiocese, and Religious
from convents and students from high schools and colleges
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He Was Self-Effacing; Poor In Spirit
Speaking of him in the days after his death,
many recalled his humble, self-effacing posture
that became so familiar, it was almost an
unremarked attribute. In a prayer sevice held for
those who work at the Catholic Center Oct. 16,
Father Louis Naughton observed that the arch
bishop was “poor in spirit without ever becoming
self-righteous or getting up on a soapbox about it.”
Finance director Joseph Estafen remembered the
slightly overestimated repair bill that was
necessary to finally separate the archbishop from
his 1978 black Chevrolet in 1986 when it had well
over 100,000 miles on it. Then it was replaced by an
absolutely identical, although new model.
Sister Mary Jane Stapleton, who had directed
religious education for children in Griffin and sur
rounding missions in McDonough and Jackson in
the 1970s, wiped tears from her cheeks after the
ecumenical service Saturday morning, Oct. 17,
and remembered the visiting archbishop coming
to the outlying missions for Confirmations and
then taking his place socially among his people.
“He sat with the children at those god-awful
cafeteria tables. He waited in line with the children
and their parents to get his dinner. He waited in line
just like anybody else you see,” she said. “Hestood
in line, he stood in line.”
Recalling his “warm welcome” to her every
time she saw him, Sister Stapleton said she believ
ed it was because he saw her as keeping the
religious education of the children going in the
outlying area, a concern which would be very im
portant to him. Returning to the diocese in 1983,
after spending three years caring for her aging
mother in Philadelphia, she popped into the arch
bishop’s office.
Welcoming her, hearing her news, she ended the
conversation by blurting out that she hadn’t been
able to get to confession “for years.” “He said,
‘Right now’s the time,’’’she recalled and after
hearing her confession in his office, helped her
through the Act of Contrition.
-Reiser
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