COMMENTARY: Remembering John O’Connor

c. 2000 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 Press.) (UNDATED) John O’Connor, a cardinal archbishop of the Roman Catholic Church who died Wednesday (May 3), was […]

c. 2000 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 Press.)

(UNDATED) John O’Connor, a cardinal archbishop of the Roman Catholic Church who died Wednesday (May 3), was not yet an admiral in the United States Navy when I met him.


Fusing these titles, however, summarizes his remarkable career and tells you something, but not quite everything, about this remarkable man.

It takes a special kind of person to achieve, in one lifetime, the highest ranks in two demanding institutions, the Navy and the church. John O’Connor’s strength lay in the energy and the loyalty that he gave to these highly disciplined, by-the-book organizations. He did not, however, lose the special character of his personality or the twinkle in his pale blue eyes by investing himself completely in cultures of systems and obedience.

He was a chaplain who operated against the overwhelming and impersonal background of war by huddling in an intensely personal way over the wounded and the dying. When we met, he was attending a workshop for chaplains at which I was a speaker.

Over the more than 30 years that have since passed, he often reminded me of a story I had told during one of the sessions about bringing my father to a hospital where the receptionist gave me a tag and said, “You can forget your father’s name but don’t forget his number.” That touched what he believed in himself.

You cannot understand John O’Connor at all unless you grasp his commitment to gaze personally at all those wearied or wounded by war or by life even after he had scaled the highest reaches of two rigid bureaucracies. In his case the uniform, whether Navy blue or cardinal crimson, did not make the man.

He was entrusted with high offices, however, because his superiors recognized he would always support and stand by the institutions without betraying their confidences or awkwardly publicizing their mistakes. He was a stabilizer for the vessel of the Navy and a rock for the structure of the church.

John O’Connor entered the public arena as a truly countercultural figure in a city, New York, that made little room and condemned as narrow minded anyone bold enough to challenge its programmatic open-mindedness. As he saw his mission, it was to make clear what the Catholic church taught on the subjects, such as abortion, that powerful and sophisticated New Yorkers had written off at sharp intellectual discount years before.


He gave voice to his institutional commitment as I rode with him one morning to visit a hospital during his first year in New York. “The Catholic church resembles China, a sleeping giant that, when awakened, will be heard from.”

And so, first to its irritation and finally, and grudgingly, to its admiration, the Catholic church was heard from through John O’Connor. As A. M. Rosenthal, former executive editor of The New York Times, once told me, “I like the cardinal. With him, as with few others, you know where he stands.”

Not everybody _ not even all his clergy or all New York Catholics _ agreed with his positions. There was no doubt, however, that he was supporting the official views of the church and reflecting the mind of the pope who had appointed him to New York because, as the late Catholic historian Monsignor John Tracy Ellis put it, “they were exactly alike.”

He will be remembered, for good or for less than that, by many as a churchman, a man of the church who was willing to sacrifice his own feelings and to accept misunderstandings in order to stand by and with the institutional church.

He was all that, surely, but, as I sort out my memories of him, he is, first and foremost, something else as well, a pastor whose head may have been with the pope but whose heart was always with the people. He responded spontaneously to human suffering and need, going, without advance publicity, to accident scenes and fires, to hospitals and private homes, not because he had people’s numbers but because he never forgot that they had names.

So I recall him as I found him one early morning in the chapel of his residence behind St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Manhattan was waking up and the sound of traffic was swelling like that of summer crickets. Cardinal O’Connor was kneeling upright in the first pew, his unsupported arms at his sides. He remained there, wholly concentrated, unaware that I had come and unaware when I left.


You cannot fake that, I understood, as I made my way to the great cathedral where he would say Mass a half hour later. It was part of his hidden life, of an uncompromising churchman who was, beneath his many titles and honors, what he wanted most to be, a parish priest and pastor.

DEA END KENNEDY

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