The city of New Orleans, long known for the most wonderful funerals in the world, is now preparing to bury the greatest human being who ever lived there. Archbishop Philip Hannan, relatively obscure by global standards, died at age 98 on Thursday and next week his casket will be solemnly and reverently lowered into the floor of his beloved St. Louis Cathedral after a huge funeral Mass is held.

What you need to know is that as a young priest he buried President John F. Kennedy at Arlington National Cemetery. You should also note he later buried Bobby and then, some years later, presided over final rites for the beautiful Jackie. He served the Catholic Church for 71 years, the last 46 as the vivid and purposeful leader of the Archdiocese of New Orleans.

It is important that you also learn he was a paratroop chaplain with the 82nd Airborne and would often tell others he never felt more like a priest than when he was giving blessings and general absolution to wounded and dying GIs during the infamous Battle of the Bulge, this a daily task as our half-frozen 82nd repelled Hitler’s last offensive through the Ardennes.

Oh, the glorious day that Pope John Paul II stood next to him 43 years later on an elevated outdoor altar looking out over a crowd of more than 100,000 who had gathered for a Mass at the New Orleans Lakefront was pretty special, too, but the Archbishop’s greatness was in the gregarious, accessible and sometimes forceful way he shaped the hearts of quite literally an entire city and much of a state for several generations.

My brush with Archbishop Hannan was from a great distance. A New Orleans sports writer who was my friend many years ago, Peter Finney, once helped him write his memoirs in a book called “The Archbishop Wore Combat Boots” that heralded a life that went “from Combat to Camelot to Katrina.” It is an absolute treasure.

Upon Archbishop Hannan’s death this week the New Orleans Times-Picayune immediately printed a stirring and triumphant eulogy where writer Bruce Nolan recalled, “In the autumn of 2002, Hannan rose in a meeting of American bishops to oppose their skepticism about the morality of the looming war in Iraq. He supported military action, telling them what he had seen of the Nazis years earlier.”

The writer recalled the angry Hannan said, “They’ve never seen it!” speaking of tyranny like that of Iraq leader Saddam Hussein. “They don’t know what the hell they are talking about!”

On that point Finney remembered that once he had asked the Archbishop how naïve bishops could be. “He said, ‘Very.’”

Yet what fascinated me the most, as I stopped to read all I could about Archbishop Hannan’s blessed life on earth yesterday, was a first-person remembrance of World War II that the Catholic leader wrote himself for the Times-Picayune in April of 1995.

Hannan wrote that towards the end, when the 82nd had just accepted the surrender of 150,000 Germans, he got word that a concentration camp had just been discovered in Woebbelin, Germany, which was not far away. He and his aide commandeered a Jeep and discovered a horrible situation.

But, wait … let’s allow Archbishop Hannan to tell his own story:

The able-bodied prisoners had already fled the camp, leaving only the sick and starving. Some of our soldiers had brought food, but they couldn’t stay. There was a token group of American soldiers there, but they were unable to organize the help needed to care for the many who were left.

So I got permission from my regimental commander to care for the remaining prisoners. He said he would allow me and my assistant to do it, but none of the other men, because he was afraid it was full of diseases.

The camp was close to the woods and it had a gate made of barbed wire and wood, and it was open. The German guards had taken off as soon as they saw the Americans in the neighborhood.

The prisoners were housed in low buildings that had three or four tiers of bunks, and the bunks were made simply of wood, mostly branches – they’d sleep on branches. And the difficulty was that many of them died of dysentery and were not able to move out of their bunks. So you can imagine the smell.

Of course, there were bodies all over the bunkhouses. Some in the beds, some on the floor, some piled in corners. There must have been over a thousand bodies there.

There was a hospital nearby, and they agreed to take the very sick survivors. Then I commandeered an old truck that the Germans had. And then, with the driver of the truck and my assistant, I came back to the camp and we personally loaded onto the truck all the survivors.

I’d say it was about a thousand people. We made many trips. It took us all day and part of the next day. I gave each one of them who was a Catholic a blessing and general absolution.

Many of them weighed only 70 or 75 pounds. We could easily carry them.

We only took the desperately ill to the hospital. I made sure the nurses were taking good care of them. Those who were still able to walk we left in the camp. The ranking officer, a Dutchman, was named commanding officer. He was in charge of everything.

Then I left in my Army Jeep, with my assistant, and I went back to being a chaplain.

That’s right … just “back to being a chaplain.”

Philip M. Hannan’s life should not only be celebrated but remembered, treasured and gilded in gold. From bringing Viet Nam refugees to New Orleans to fitfully sleeping on the floor of his office during the first three fateful days of Katrina, one could write lengthy stories on literally every day of this modern-day saint’s ministry to others.

The pictures it would include, oh my goodness. Handing President Kennedy’s folded flag to Jackie, presiding over the church-run social services for New Orleans all those years, meeting with the Pope at the Vatican and with every living president since Jack. Can’t you just imagine?

But, in the end, dying at age 98 blanketed only in the love and grace of his Lord God Almighty. As the poet Emily Dickinson once wrote, “Unable are the loved to die. For love is immortality.”

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