Retired Archbishop Philip M. Hannan, a confidant to President John F. Kennedy and the leader of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New Orleans for more than 20 years, died on Thursday at a hospice in New Orleans. The archbishop, who delivered the eulogy for President Kennedy in 1963, was 98.
The archdiocese confirmed his death, saying he had been in declining health for several years.
It was in the late 1940s when the archbishop, Father Hannan at the time, met Kennedy, then a young Democratic congressman from Massachusetts. A priest had come to Kennedy’s office, unannounced, insisting that as a Catholic the congressman had to defend the church in Mexico against opponents in the Mexican government.
Kennedy was irate — until a colleague put him in touch with Father Hannan, who was then an assistant chancellor in the Archdiocese of Washington. Father Hannan assured Kennedy that the priest had violated protocol by directly approaching a member of Congress, and he promised to speak to the priest. That was the start of a long friendship.
“When Kennedy had a question about how politics and church teaching intersected, he would give Father Hannan a call,” said Peter Finney Jr., editor of The Clarion Herald, the New Orleans archdiocese’s newspaper. The issues they touched on included race relations and tensions between tenets faith and Constitutional mandates.