The Archbishop Wore Combat Boots. Nancy A. Collins

my youngest brother, Jerry, born in 1922. Sitting on the bottom step of the porch, Mary, crooking a leg around the axle, would rock him to sleep while reading a book and knitting a sweater. Later, after graduating from Trinity College, she became the first laywoman student at Catholic University of America to secure a doctorate, majoring in mathematics, Greek, and Latin. During my seminary years, I leaned a lot on my sister who knew more Latin than most of my professors. When it was time to choose my episcopal motto — “Caritas Vinculum Perfectionis” (“Charity Is the Bond of Perfection”) — I ran it past just one person: Mary liked it, which was good enough for me. From my perspective, if she wasn’t the most wonderful creature God ever made, she was darn close.

      Positioned in the middle of seven boys, I was the fourth son. The eldest, John, born in 1907, unfortunately suffered a serious brain injury when he was hit by a truck riding his bicycle — so unnerving our parents that they forbade the rest of us to go anywhere near one. After graduating from high school, John joined my father in the plumbing business. The second son, Frank, born in 1909, graduated from Georgetown Medical School and, following World War II, in thanksgiving for making it out alive, devoted himself to caring for the sick (charging $2 for an office call and $5 for a home visit) with patients ranging from top names in government to anyone who walked in his office door. Bill came along next in 1911, going on to become a prominent D.C. trial lawyer and partner in the law firm of O’Connor and Hannan. Advising me on difficult cases when I was a bishop, Bill refused to take on a divorce — except when I asked that he help a priest who, having married, wished to return to the Church.

      Tom followed me in 1915, eventually graduating from Catholic University’s School of Engineering; while Denis, born four years later, was inducted into the Army on the first draft following high school graduation, serving in six major World War II campaigns from North Africa to Italy, including the terrible battles near the Benedictine Abbey at Monte Cassino. Returning home, he went into the rug business, eventually working for the federal government. (Although Denis, Frank, and I all served in the Army during WWII, none of us, by the grace of God, was wounded, with Frank hauling home the best show-and-tell piece: a large chunk of the shell that grazed his helmet.) The youngest Hannan, Jerry, born in 1922, was a brilliant student, speeding through elementary school in six years to graduate from Catholic University’s School of Science. Exempted from the draft to work at the Carnegie Institution’s Geophysical Laboratory, Jerry spearheaded a study that improved the service life of gun barrels.

      Sitting around the dining room table, we joked that we had everything covered but an undertaker.

      All the boys in the family attended nearby St. John’s College High School where the Christian Brothers had developed a college-prep curriculum specializing in science and mathematics (four years) and Latin (two years). I even learned how to type — a skill that came in handy later when I got involved in Catholic journalism. I fared well in my studies (was valedictorian) — along with being cadet captain — and at the end of the four years received a scholarship to Catholic University.

      Large families naturally develop into sections. In ours, I teamed up with my older brother Bill, who was good-looking, sociable, a great singer, and never bashful or cautious. We often went to parties and dances together, sometimes double dating. One night, after attending an event at St. John’s High School (therefore wearing a cadet corps uniform, gray with scarlet trimming, much like West Point’s), we passed by the Mayflower Hotel where a dance for West Point cadets was in progress. “Our uniforms look just like theirs. Let’s try to get in,” Bill said. Naturally, I tagged along. We made it in until an ominous-looking officer approached and escorted us out. Bill’s advice was not always perfect.

      Parents

      Despite their opposing temperaments, my parents were extraordinary role models. Lilian, dedicated to Catholicism and education, firmly believed that it was the mother who was responsible for the family’s direction. Not only did she keep the books for the plumbing business, she cooked, sewed, heard our lessons, gathered us for Rosary, and made sure we were never late to serve Mass on the altar at St. Matthew’s. Moreover, she was a gracious hostess, constantly hosting meetings and encouraging women to attend retreats as well as holding dances, since both parents loved to celebrate. (When I was fifteen, declaring it was high time I learned to rhythmically negotiate my feet, she pushed me around the floor of our spacious parlor. “It’s important for you to know how to dance,” she insisted. “You’ll need it.”) She was also great with a buck. Her economy in running our home not only guaranteed each of us any education we wanted but also allowed my father to acquire any property he wanted for additional income — not only for himself.

      Charity was the supreme virtue of my father’s life — starting with his own people. Encouraging any Irish immigrant who crossed his path to buy a home as soon as he got a job, he opened his own Savings and Loan. Each week, these hopeful, newly minted Americans would bring their deposits — and books — to our house where a special box on the hall mantle was reserved as the bank. Once their weekly “board meetings” adjourned, my father deposited their fistfuls of money into their bank. The immigrants trusted my father, and he, in turn, honored their trust. One “regular,” a maid pulling in $30 a month, saved enough to buy a small house in Georgetown where, at that time, property was cheap. Upon her death, she left everything to the archdiocese, which sold it for unimaginable profit. Years later, when I was chancellor, another maid whom my father helped purchase two houses on M Street near 18th also willed both to the archdiocese, which turned them around for $250,000. (A lifelong member of the St. Vincent de Paul Society, Dad, opposing those who advocated keeping “a safe balance of funds on hand,” always voted to give any that was available to the poor. “The money was given by people who want it used to aid the less fortunate,” he argued at the Society’s weekly appeals meeting. “Leaving it on a balance sheet doesn’t help them.”)

      Altruism aside, my father certainly wasn’t above flashes of Irish temper. When it came to the delays by city bureaucracy in granting his frequent applications for plumbing work, he would take on anybody. “As soon as Frank Hannan comes through the door,” district building officers were heard to remark, “there’s going to be a fight.” They were wrong. The Boss had his fists up before walking through them. When it came to his employees, however, almost anyone was given a chance to prove himself. “I’ll always remember,” he said to us again and again, “that I was once a greenhorn, needing help.”

      Growing up, we were surrounded by aunts, uncles, and cousins — all of whom lived within a five-block radius.

      The “other” Hannan family, my father’s older brother, Will, and his nine children, lived down the block. The operator of a large, prosperous grocery store, Uncle Will saved every penny to bring his family, including my father, over from Ireland. A devout Catholic and member of every known parish organization (including the Nocturnal Adoration, where as group leader he would read aloud every word in the prayer pamphlet, including “Now be seated”), it was almost fitting that Uncle Will was killed crossing 17th Street on his way to confession at St. Matthew’s.

      My father’s sister, meanwhile, Molly Ryan, and her two sons, lived on P Street; while the big house on the corner of 17th and T Street was home to the Boss’s other sister, Margaret “Maggie” Collins, her husband, Aeneas Patrick, and their children: Margaret, Mary, Bill, and Aeneas Patrick’ — called “Collie” — with whom my brother and I palled around. Smart, fun-loving, and witty, Collie, after serving in the Coast Guard during World War II, signed on at the fledgling National Institutes of Health as a medical librarian, where he helped build the institution’s world renowned library. Always full of surprises, Collie and his beautiful southern wife, Elsie, shocked our Washington clan (almost as much as I did when announcing that I wanted to be a priest) by moving their family in 1954 to what we considered the genuine wild west — that is, Hamilton, Montana — to take over the medical library at The Rocky Mountain Laboratory, a branch of the NIH. (Their son, Pat, a Bronze Star recipient in Vietnam and a Republican campaign manager, in 1980 at age 35 was appointed the Undersecretary of Energy in the Reagan Administration, at the time one of the youngest undersecretaries in any department. Later, it was his sister, Nancy — a respected print and TV journalist whose interviews have appeared in Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, and Architectural Digest, as