c. 1999 Religion News Service

(Eugene Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author most recently of”My Brother Joseph,”published by St. Martin’s Press.)

UNDATED _ The late Cardinal Joseph Bernardin faced up forthrightly to the many false accusations _ such as being called a sexual abuser _ made against him during his long service to the Roman Catholic Church as a priest and bishop.

Charges continue to be made against him _ which in my mind attest to his greatness and goodness. He is regularly demonized in the St. Paul, Minn.-based paper, The Wanderer, whose columns still hint darkly of forthcoming lurid revelations (they never appear) about the late archbishop of Chicago.

It is easy to apply the Walnut Test to such papers: They are hard-shelled, wreathed in wrinkles, and, if you split them open, you find just what you expect.

That test is not so easily applied to those who have attempted recently to diminish Bernardin by saying that while he may have been a saint, he failed as a leader because he”sought consensus”and wanted”to make everybody happy.” This off-handed dismissal is designed to retire Bernardin’s reputation by praising it with faint damnation.

In fact, Bernardin _ about whom I wrote a book _ was acutely aware that if he were to lead the church in Chicago and America he would forever be caught between camps that he could never fully please. Moreover, he was courageous in”letting go”of the human longing to be approved, even by those with whom we disagree.

He searched himself deeply as he pursued the ideal of”emptying himself”after the example of Jesus. In retreat notes made shortly before he was stricken with pancreatic cancer, Bernardin identifies the central source of tension in his spiritual life. His struggle, as in the lives of all truly holy persons, was to surrender himself totally to God’s will.

One feels the dying in his intensely personal confrontation with the challenge Jesus offered to him:”It is his church; nothing happens that is beyond his purview … Yet, I seem to be unwilling to let go. Is it because, at times, I fear that his will may be different from mine and that if his will wins out I will be criticized?” This is not a man standing in a neutral corner so that no punches can be thrown at him. This is a saint sorting out the wheat from the chaff in his own soul, experiencing in himself the spiritual rhythm underscored in every Holy Week, that death to his own wishes was the condition for his bringing the life of the spirit to others.

We stand watch at this internal Calvary as he takes on, rather than puts aside, the cross of his work:”(A)t times I am caught between the more progressive elements in the church (who expect me to carry their banner) and the more conservative elements (including my peers) who expect me to support their agenda.” Such were the profound reflections of an archbishop who understood that rejecting the temptation to make everybody happy lay at the center of his spiritual growth and his calling to be a church leader. Did he want to please everybody when he chaired the committee that successfully drafted the bishops’ pastoral letter on the use nuclear arms and opened him to a storm of criticism?

Was it a man eager for applause from both sides of the room who introduced the Consistent Ethic of Life, that eminently Catholic broadening of the pro-life agenda recently adopted by Pope John Paul II during his recent visit to St. Louis? At the time, that initiative earned scorn for Bernardin. During his last illness, extremists, unhappy with his position, protested noisily outside his residence.

His final effort to find common ground on which the family of Catholicism might hold a reunion was, in an unprecedented shattering of protocol, denounced by some of his brother cardinals.

In his speech at Georgetown University on the day he received the Medal of Freedom, obviously dying on his feet, he defended the church’s role in shaping public policy, even as he understood the criticism that secular interests held for bishops who aspired to say more than grace before meals with politicians and officeholders.

Bernardin was considered a holy man not only because of his personal prayers, but because of his courage in preaching the Gospel in season and out, whether it pleased everybody or anybody. He put it this way:”(Jesus) knew that suffering/death were the key to ultimate success. We can expect no less. Our suffering/death … is more a death to ourselves _ a readiness/willingness to cede our will to his …” Do his latest critics live as courageously as did Cardinal Joseph Bernardin?

IR END KENNEDY