Archbishop Quigley Preparatory Seminary - Mundelein's "Paperhanger" Speech and His Impact On Quigley

Mundelein's "Paperhanger" Speech and His Impact On Quigley

Perhaps the most memorable event in Quigley Seminary's history came on Tuesday, 18 May 1937, when Cardinal Mundelein, speaking to 500 priests at Quigley during a quarterly diocesan conference, lashed out at Nazi leaders Adolf Hitler, Joseph Goebbels, and Hermann Göring for using the pretext of "immorality" and sexual scandals to attack Catholic religious orders, organizations, and German Catholic schools, which at the time educated two million children, saying:

The fight is to take the children away from us. If we show no interest in this matter now, if we shrug our shoulders and mutter, 'Maybe there is some truth in it, or maybe it is not our fight;' if we don't back up our Holy Father (Pope Pius XI) when we have a chance, well when our turn comes we, too, will be fighting alone. . . . Perhaps you will ask how it is that a nation of sixty million people, intelligent people, will submit in fear to an alien, an Austrian paperhanger, and a poor one at that I am told, and a few associates like Goebbels and Göring who dictate every move of the people's lives...

Nazi minister Goebbels, labeled a "crooked minister of propaganda" in the same speech by Mundelein, responded furiously within days at a mass rally with 18,000 attendants, demanding that the Vatican discipline Mundelein, which it refused to do. Nazi attacks on German Catholic institutions intensified, and 200 Catholic newspapers were shut down. In Philadelphia, the International Brotherhood of Painters, Paperhangers, and Decorators for their part took exception to the Cardinal's classification of Hitler as a "paperhanger" in any case, despite Mundelein's remarks "he was not a very good one."

Mundelein similarly championed Quigley, and personally recruited Catholic families to send their sons into the priesthood, including Frederick and Reynold Henry Hillenbrand, sons of the dentist who treated Mundelein's niece, and later treated Mundelein himself. In a 2 January 1938 speech to 2,000 members of the Holy Name Society at Holy Name Cathedral, Chicago, Mundelein said:

Our place is beside the poor, behind the working man. They are our people; they build our churches, they occupy our pews, their children crowd our schools, our priests come from their sons. They look to us for leadership, but they look to us, too, for support.

Chicago's poor and working people comprised many immigrant groups, and Mundelein used his seminaries to break down ethnic barriers among the clergy. Ethnic groups fought back, and demanded concessions from Mundelein to preserve their identity. One such concession was that Quigley students of Polish descent had to learn Polish, a practice that continued from Mundelein's day until 1960.