WASHINGTON — Cardinal William Wakefield Baum, the third archbishop of Washington and the longest-serving American cardinal, died on July 23, at the age of 88.

“Cardinal Baum was a joy-filled priest with a firm personal commitment to serve the Lord, which he did faithfully for 64 years of ordained life,” said Cardinal Donald Wuerl of Washington in a statement, following Cardinal Baum’s passing. “He will be remembered for his kindness and dedication to the ministry to which God called him.”

After a funeral Mass at the Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle in Washington on July 31, the cardinal will be laid to rest in the cathedral’s crypt, adjacent to the Chapel of St. Francis of Assisi.

Born in Dallas on Nov. 21, 1926, the future cardinal lived a life dedicated to Christ, beginning with his service as an altar boy at the age of 10 in Kansas City, Mo., continuing through his ordination in 1951, his consecration as a bishop in 1970, and Pope Paul VI naming him a cardinal in 1976, three years after his appointment as archbishop of Washington.

Cardinal Baum’s active ministry concluded with more than two decades of service as a senior Vatican official, first as prefect for the Congregation of Catholic Education and subsequently as major penitentiary of the Apostolic Penitentiary, before his retirement in 2001 at the age of 75.

In May 1951, when he was ordained to the priesthood, the new Father Baum began serving at a Kansas City parish and teaching at Catholic schools, including Avila College. Not long after, he was sent to Rome to earn his licentiate degree, followed by a doctorate in sacred theology.

Back in Kansas City by 1958, he was appointed secretary of the diocesan tribunal, served in two parishes and again taught at Avila College.

 

Second Vatican Council Role

In 1962, Bishop Charles Helmsing of Kansas City-St. Joseph, Mo., took the then-Msgr. Baum with him to the Second Vatican Council as an adviser, and the Holy See also appointed Msgr. Baum a peritus (expert adviser) at the Council. He worked with the Secretariat for Christian Unity and took part in drafting Unitatis Redintegratio, the decree on ecumenism.

That same year, he was tapped as the first executive director of the new Committee for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs formed by the U.S. bishops.

“The dialogue that we started right after the Council would be related to his work,” observed Father John Crossin, the current executive director of the U.S. bishops’ Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs department. The work begun by Cardinal Baum “would begin a dialogue with major churches of this country, and that dialogue continues to this day.”

Father Crossin noted the work started by the cardinal reached a major milestone this past May: Dialogue with the Lutherans marked a 50-year anniversary.

Cardinal Baum’s interest in ecumenical dialogue likely came from his family, Father Crossin suggested.

“He came from an inter-church family,” he said. When his Presbyterian father died, his mother remarried, and his Jewish stepfather adopted him.

In 1972, having been named the third bishop of Springfield-Cape Girardeau, Mo., two years earlier, Cardinal Baum continued his ecumenical service as chairman of the U.S. bishops’ Committee for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs.

 

Master of Catholic Education

When Archbishop Leonard Blair of Hartford, Conn., the chairman of the bishops’ Committee on Evangelization and Catechesis, was living and working in Rome, he was Cardinal Baum’s neighbor. “He was a man of great intellect and culture and deeply committed to Christ and to the work of Pope St. John Paul II’s pontificate,” recalled Archbishop Blair. He said that it was John Paul who brought Cardinal Baum to Rome.

There, he became prefect for the Congregation for Catholic Education in January of 1980. “That would be an appointment that John Paul II would have made,” said Regis Martin, author and frequent panelist on EWTN’s Franciscan University Presents. “Cardinal Baum worked closely with him and closely with Cardinal [Joseph] Ratzinger and Cardinal Christoph Schönborn.”

While in that office, Cardinal Baum helped draft the 1992 Catechism of the Catholic Church, which was promulgated by John Paul II. “Cardinal Baum was one of the collaborators,” Martin said.

The cardinal had a hand in giving Ex Corde Ecclesiae, John Paul II’s apostolic constitution on Catholic higher education, shape and expression too. As Martin recalled, “He had the ear of the Pope, and the Holy Father had a great deal of confidence in him.”

Cardinal Baum’s friendship with the Holy Father predated his appointment in Rome. As Martin explained, “He had formed a great friendship with then-Cardinal Karol Wojtyla. When he was archbishop of Krakow, he invited Baum to Poland and made a great fuss over him. They were great friends and collaborators.”

During his years as prefect of the Congregation for Catholic Education, Cardinal Baum oversaw seminaries and Catholic colleges and universities around the world, and he also oversaw the establishment of the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family in Washington in 1988.

Timothy O’Donnell, president of Christendom College, reflected on Cardinal Baum’s years working with Catholic education. He told the Register, “Cardinal Baum was a great man with a deep love for Christ and his Church, which he served with joy and fidelity for many years. In times of confusion and difficulty, he spoke and led the Congregation for (Catholic) Education with clarity and courage. The passing of this great Churchman (a fellow graduate of the Angelicum in Rome), marks the passing of an era.”

 

Vivid Memories

The Angelicum had a role in Regis Martin’s camaraderie with Cardinal Baum, whom he met shortly after he was appointed archbishop of Washington in 1973.

“He really impressed me at the time,” Martin recalled. “I was greatly struck by his learning, his piety, his good manners and his sense of culture.”

“We do have one commonality: We were both students at the Angelicum, although separated by many years. I graduated in 1988. He got his degrees in the mid-1950s. He was something of a wonder boy there. He made something of a splash in ecumenical circles — and he was absolutely rock-solid as a Catholic.”

Martin also saw Cardinal Baum from the start as a person with great vision: “He really struck me favorably as a man of great learning and very innovative, in the sense he was open to ideas that were not all usual, but orthodox. He seemed very receptive to the ideas of a Christian culture.”

Martin said the cardinal was committed to the idea that Christ ought to engage the culture; it simply wasn’t a private affair between the soul and God, mediated by Christ through the usual channels of the Church’s sacraments. The faith had something to say to culture, so we ought to “baptize the culture,” so to speak, Martin explained of the cardinal’s worldview.

Overall, Martin recalled other qualities he saw in Cardinal Baum. “He had those qualities, that combination of learning and holiness, I found in the Holy Father [John Paul II] and Cardinal Ratzinger. He also did impress me with his sense of humor. He wasn’t pompous. He wasn’t distant or forbidding. He was a very approachable guy. I liked him immediately.”

Others were similarly inspired by friendship with the cardinal.

“He was always a very gracious person and sophisticated man,” Father Crossin recalled as he looked at a photo of the cardinal displayed on his office wall.

“With his death, I have lost a longtime friend with whom I had the privilege of working in a variety of capacities, going back to the late ’70s,” noted Cardinal Wuerl in his statement.

And George Weigel, biographer to John Paul II, in a 2011 reflection, noted that the cardinal “was an old-school gentleman, he was deeply learned and manifestly holy.”

 

‘Unparalleled Service’

Under Cardinal Baum’s direction, Cardinal Wuerl assisted with the first apostolic visitation of the seminaries in the United States, which was requested by Pope John Paul II between 1981 and 1986.

Baum had been named a cardinal five years earlier, in 1976. At the time, he was 49 years old and archbishop of Washington.

He came to show the same longevity in the College of Cardinals that his friend John Paul II did as Holy Father. By the time of his death, Cardinal Baum had been a cardinal for 39 years, surpassing the 34 years of the former longest-serving U.S. prelate, Cardinal James Gibbons of Baltimore.

During his time at the Vatican, Cardinal Baum was also appointed major penitentiary of the Apostolic Penitentiary, the Vatican office for matters of conscience, in 1990. He served in that office until his retirement.

There — as during his priesthood and from his beginnings as a bishop in 1970, when he took for his episcopal motto Ministerium Reconciliationis (The ministry of reconciliation; 2 Corinthians 5:18) — Cardinal Baum promoted the frequent use of the sacrament of penance.

In 2001, the year of his retirement, the Knights of Columbus bestowed upon Cardinal Baum the fraternal order’s highest honor, the Gaudium et Spes Award, for his service to the Church and society. The ceremony was held in Rome. During the event, then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI, presented a tribute to Cardinal Baum.

In a statement released by the Knights of Columbus after the cardinal’s death, Supreme Knight Carl Anderson called Cardinal Baum both a close personal friend and a good friend of the order, while noting his dedication to the Church of Christ.

“His life was an unparalleled service to the universal Church and to the Church in the United States,” Anderson said, “made even more meaningful by his many years of suffering from painful medical conditions.” Indeed, Regis Martin recalled, years earlier, upon their first meeting, the cardinal struck him as “a very delicate man, very fragile.”

Yet, despite that suffering, which included macular degeneration that made it difficult to read, Cardinal Baum served untiringly in the priesthood for 64 years.

“He bore a cross of infirmity and illness with great patience,” explained Archbishop Blair. “He had a number of health problems over the years in the later part of his life.”

Paying tribute to his friend on his blog, Cardinal Wuerl noted: “Throughout his ministry here, as elsewhere, he set a great example, modeling the love of Jesus as he worked for Catholic education, Christian unity and social harmony in building up the kingdom of God in our midst. As in the case of every priest, quietly the voice of the Holy Spirit echoed in his heart.”

In whatever he did, Cardinal Baum had “total dedication to a single vision — the vision of the priesthood as Christ at work in his Church and his personal firm commitment to serve the Lord as his priest.”

 

Joseph Pronechen is the Register’s staff writer.