NEW ORLEANS (LA)
The Times-Picayune
November 8, 2018
By Drew Broach
As the rain ceased and the skies cleared on the afternoon of Sept. 12, 1987, the world leader of Roman Catholicism stepped to the altar of a canopied pavilion at the University of New Orleans and, before 130,000 sweltering faithful, raised the body of Christ during communion. Standing just behind and to the right of Pope John Paul II was the concelebrant of the outdoor Mass, Archbishop Philip Hannan, who would later recall the pontiff’s three-day visit to his city as the apogee of his 24-year episcopate.
Hannan died in 2011, a tough, colorful prelate who not only scored the coup of a papal visit but more broadly was revered as the architect of a sprawling network of new social services for poor people, elderly people and immigrants in southeast Louisiana.
Now, however, Hannan’s legacy – and that of one of his predecessors, Joseph Rummel, the longest-serving archbishop in New Orleans history — is coming under new scrutiny, the result of changing societal values and of a belated effort by the Catholic Church, especially in the United States, to come clean about its history of pedophile priests and its institutional coverup of their misbehavior.
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