System Mechanic - Clean, repair, protect, and speed up your PC!Joseph Cardinal Bernardin
Joseph Cardinal Bernardin was not the kind of guy Jesus was looking for when He said, "I came not to send peace but a sword." Bernardin was in the great tradition of the Sermon on the Mount, "Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God." If there was an additional beatitude, one for the bureaucrats who straighten out the affairs of a screwed up diocese, Bernardin would have copped that one too.
Bernardin, who died Nov. 14, 1996 age 68, was probably the most salient Catholic in America and the only person in this country taken seriously as a candidate for the papacy.
Among the highlights of his career were a pastoral letter opposing nuclear war that rattled a president; the reorganization of the beleaguered Chicago Archipiscopate; a call to the Catholic church to atone for centuries of antisemitism; and a devotion to the "seamless garmet," a position which opposed both capital punishment and abortion, one of the few consistent ideas about the value of life in the public arena.
His final contribution to civilization was brought about by his terminal illness. Stricken with cancer, he pronounced death a "friend" and worked to extend his personal ministry to embrace the dying. His last public act was an amicus brief to the Supreme Court opposing "right to die" legislation.
Throughout his career Barnardin was known as a conciliator, as a man who worked to bring opposing points of view into dialog if not into agreement. On the role of women in the church, for instance, he took a long view. "His style is to see to it that we have altar girls now, so that if there are to be female priests in the next century, we'll have women with the necessary experience," said his biographer, Eugene Kennedy. Such an approach tended to alienate extremists, while facilitating an openness to change. Barnardin was an outspoken exponent of the Second Vatican Council's modernizations and experiments despite the rancor it wrought. "I believe that the Council was inspired by the Spirit," he told the Times in his final interview.
His career saw two great controversies: the Catholic Bishop's pastoral letter on nuclear war, and an accusation by a former student that Bernardin had sexually abused him.
The 1983 pastoral letter was issued at the height of President Reagan's Cold War sabre-rattling. Events of the past decade have obscured the nuclear fear which hung over the world at that time.
The Challenge of Peace: God's Promise and Our Response was one of the first signs that the American Catholic Church could speak out boldly and critically on national policies. The letter rejected the bombing of population centres, the first use of nuclear weapons and any rationale for nuclear war, directly opposing the U.S. "first-strike" strategy. Bernardin called the document "perhaps the most important and timely pastoral letter ever to come from the American hierarchy in its nearly two centuries of existence." It angered the Reagan administration and the national Catholic hierarchy was for a time cast in the leftist bomb-throwing role of labor unions and college students. It was a great thing.
The accusations of sexual abuse came in 1993 from an AIDS-infected former seminarian who, under hypnosis, reconstruced episodes of sexual abuse with the Cardinal. While the accusations themselves made national headlines, the case took on even more importance when the accuser recanted and the Cardinal forgave him and prayed with him. Bernardin had previously constituted a housecleaning of pederastic priests in his see, and it thus was ironic at best that he himself was accused. The church's history of witchcraft accusations seems an appropriate comparison. "Never in my 43 years as a priest have I experienced a more profound reconciliation," he said afterwards. Still, he confided to friends that the incident remained his most painful experience.
It is hardly accurate to speak of Bernardin as having a private life, or even much of a sense of humor. But he is remembered for his fine rendition of spaghetti carbonara (which will endear almost anybody to GoodBye!'s heart) and a joke he once made when picking out the site for his tomb. Bernardin put his hand on the crypt next to the one belonging to his predecessor, Archbishop Cody. He looked at his assistant and said, "I've always been a little left of Cody."
