Published February 28, 2013
- In the Feb. 14, 1963 issue of The Georgia Bulletin, Archbishop Paul J. Hallinan wrote about the importance of the Catholic press, during Catholic Press Month, encouraging his “dear Catholic people” to take advantage of Catholic newspapers, magazines, pamphlets and books. They are, he wrote, Catholic, with a capital C, and catholic, with a small c, with “worldwide concerns, a universal message, a truly total scope.” The Georgia Bulletin, Archbishop Hallinan wrote, “is a case in point. It is speaking to Catholics, but also to our whole public community. It treats of Catholic subjects—doctrine, moral problems, the liturgy, Catholic organizations, but it touches frequently on the society in which we live.” “Think of it as an invitation to a weekly tour of the whole Catholic world, with stopover privileges in Georgia,” Archbishop Hallinan wrote. He quoted Pope St. Pius X, patron of the diocese, as saying: “To be a Catholic, to call oneself a Catholic, to belong to Catholic organizations, and at the same time to be indifferent to the Catholic press, is clearly an absurdity.”
- An editorial in the same issue took the city of Atlanta to task for responding with strict security to a visit to Georgia Tech by U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren and even barring the press from coverage of the visit. While a group known as the Atlanta Committee for the Impeachment of Earl Warren had opposed his visit and put up billboards, the editorial argued that it was not necessary to “apply the heavy hand of police security for Mr. Warren’s visit.” “Atlanta is a big city with big ideas and a big future. Its citizens have grown in stature along with the urban growth. … It is time we all grew up,” the editorial stated. “The action of city officials has probably given the anti-Warren forces much more publicity than they deserve.”
- An official pilgrimage to Rome from Washington, D.C., was announced for the upcoming beatification of Elizabeth Seton on March 17, 1963, when she would become the first native-born U.S. citizen to be declared “Blessed” by the church. Pope John XXIII was to preside at the beatification Mass.
- Archbishop Josyf Slipyi of Lviv, the sole survivor of the Byzantine Rite Catholic Bishops of the Ukraine, received a hero’s welcome from Pope John XXIII when he reached the Vatican. He had experienced 18 years of imprisonment and house arrest in the Soviet Union. He, and all other Catholic bishops in his province, had been arrested by the Soviet regime in April 1945, following the Soviet annexation of the western Ukraine, including the See city of Lviv, which had been part of Poland since World War I.
