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 New York Times unintentionally paid tribute to Cardinal John O’Connor with a front-page story on education in the same edition that inside reported reactions to the news he was ill with a brain tumor.

On O’Connor, reporter Amy Waldman wrote,”His strength in facing illness corresponded to the strength he has shown in defending his positions … as a leader who stands up for what he believes … regardless of which way the prevailing winds blow.” The front-page story reflected the bankruptcy of education without standards and, by implication, vindicated the consistency of O’Connor’s life and work.”Schools Taking Tougher Stance With Standards”was the headline above a story filled with statements from educators who would have blushed and fled from the reporter had they been able to observe themselves and hear what they were saying.

Where else could you get such a mixed metaphor about the rediscovery of standards than this:”We are clearly moving into the phase of the standard-based school reform movement where the rubber meets the road.”Grade that paper C and make the student do it over again.

The account is peppered with such observations by educators, all of whom seem to claim the Eichmann excuse (“I only followed orders”) about the standardless system in which they were once sage and nodding collaborators.

That system granted social promotions to failing kids so their self-esteem wouldn’t suffer, even though they were put at permanent disadvantage for the competition of life. Schools in states that flunk students who don’t pass have, they say,”an edge.” In short, the need for standards in education is treated as if it were the discovery of a new vaccine against life’s pain and loss that people were lining up for everywhere.

Is it amusing or tragic that the need for standards should be treated as a remarkable innovation when it is, as O’Connor has always preached, the application of common sense?

Over his 15 years as archbishop of New York, O’Connor has stood out precisely because he never abandoned his values and beliefs in order to meet the expectations of New York culture.

Good archbishops would conform to its bland indifference to standards and would accept a central but strictly honorary place in its banquets and parades as well as its noisy everyday bazaar. A good archbishop would smile and never embarrass the barons of the media, finance and politics by challenging their acceptance of a”pro-choice”position on abortion.

But that is, of course, exactly what O’Connor did. He was countercultural because the culture itself had become complacently standard-averse.

Two of its principle tenets, as John O’Sullivan recently pointed out in the New Criterion, are:”It may seem sick, perverted or unhygienic to you, but tastes differ”and”Disapproving of other people is hurtful to them and bad karma to you.” So O’Connor was considered quaint by some even as he was ridiculed by others for his bold statements on the pro-life position and for his refusal to accept a safe, neutral status in the moral battles of the times.

It has been my good fortune to know the cardinal for 30 years. At the heart of his work is his pastoral concern for ordinary people in their daily struggles to lead good lives even as they bear great crosses.

I accompanied him one early morning several years ago as he drove to the upper reaches of the Bronx to visit, without announcement or publicity, a girl badly injured in an automobile wreck that had killed the rest of her family. Watching his lean Irish face as he bent close to her, I saw a parish priest lost in his concern for the suffering girl, a bishop who, giving spiritual comfort out of the city’s sight, was, in fact, giving spiritual comfort to the whole city. I was convinced that, even unpublicized, this reality would eventually seep through to New York.

Recently, in the tense confrontation between police officials and the family and friends of a man accidentally shot by officers, there was a desperate search for a mediator, for someone who could enter that hot zone without fear of the flames. Both sides asked for O’Connor to take this role, which, of course, he did, the pastor with uncompromised standards who was the only person that both sides found trustworthy.

An extraordinary discovery _ almost on a par with finding out that learning is the work of schools _ that a bishop should be found who is a living embodiment of religious standards. And now the great city that once felt embarrassed by his fidelity to his faith finally recognizes him as its most trustworthy citizen.

DEA END KENNEDY