Perspective
Leadership vacuum left behind by Bernardin
By TOM ROBERTS
The question occurred to me while
watching television coverage of Pope John Paul II last month wandering the
stage at the converted airport hangar in St. Louis amid the secular and sacred
dignitaries.
As the members of the hierarchy milled about, purple and red
piping in abundance, I couldnt help wondering who the leader of the
American church is these days.
I know the immediate reaction from some: There is no
American church. But there is, in the same way that the German
church or the Chinese church or the French church all have their distinctive
characteristics.
There is no formal title either, of course, but in most eras
someone has held the unofficial designation of first among equals. In recent
decades such figures as Cardinals John Dearden of Detroit, John Krol of
Philadelphia and, most recently, Joseph Bernardin of Chicago easily wore the
mantel, not by election (although all of them at some point served as president
of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops) so much as by force of
personality, vision and the authority they wielded rather naturally.
Bernardin is an apt measure of what is lacking in todays
church leadership. He was a high-profile bridge not only to the culture at
large but also to Rome. It is why he was called upon by his colleagues, time
and again, to help unlock conflicts and mediate seemingly intractable
disputes.
Eugene Kennedy, in his book My Brother Joseph (St.
Martins Press, 1997, $17.95) recounts one of the formative episodes in
Bernardins career. He was quietly deputed by Rome to mediate the public
showdown between Washington priests who dissented from Humanae Vitae,
the encyclical upholding the ban on the use of artificial birth control, and
Cardinal Patrick OBoyle of Washington.
His effort failed, largely because Rome refused to make it
publicly known that it had given the young then-Bishop Bernardin credentials to
mediate the dispute.
Kennedy portrays a sad and rather lonely OBoyle whose
ultimate victory turned out to be rather hollow: By the time Romes
Sacred Congregation for the Clergy accepted one of the resolutions that
Bernardin had long before proposed, most of the dissenters had already left the
priesthood, bequeathing to OBoyle a Shakespearean kings victory, a
triumph that cost the lives of some of his finest sons.
The episode deeply affected Bernardin. He felt inside
himself the hurts of the banished priests and of the isolated
cardinal.
But the experience served him well later in his career. It
was, Kennedy writes, a full initiation into the sometime ways of
great institutions, the dark secrets of their self-protective procedures, which
do not take into account, in their long calendar of history, the pain suffered
on any particular day. Joseph would serve the church but he would, if at all
possible, use what Pope John XXIII termed the medicine of mercy rather
than of severity in settling future disputes.
Kennedys little book seemed to get lost in the rush of
Bernardin books published in the wake of the cardinals death in 1996. It
is both a tender story of friendship and a fascinating peek behind the scenes
at a high-level church leader who achieved an unusual degree of credibility in
secular and sacred spheres.
What becomes clear in Kennedys account is Bernardins
ability to maintain a fierce loyalty to Rome while also not abandoning the best
of what it means to be a U.S. Catholic.
He did not see the two in opposition, though certainly there were
tensions. While the prevailing instinct today seems to require avoiding such
tensions, or burying them, Bernardin used them creatively to fashion
solutions.
So one has to wonder how different would be the debates over
inclusive language, the place of national conferences, Ex Corde
Ecclesiae and other issues if someone of Bernardins talents were able
to marshal consensus and bridge the gaps of understanding with Rome.
We are going through what Kennedy, in a different context, has
called an intermission period in the church, a time of transition, and no one
knows for certain what the future holds.
In the meantime, doses of the medicine of severity
seem to be on the rise, with excommunications and investigations and
condemnations increasingly the language of authority.
In such a time of uncertainty, the American church awaits its next
Bernardin. Or perhaps, rather, the new Bernardin is out there quietly awaiting
the next papacy.
Tom Roberts is NCRs managing editor. His E-mail
address is troberts@natcath.org
National Catholic Reporter, February 26,
1999
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