c. 2004 Religion News Service

(Eugene Cullen Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author of “Cardinal Bernardin’s Stations of the Cross,” published by St. Martin’s Press.)

(UNDATED) Boston’s Archbishop Sean O’Malley has now explained why he washed only men’s feet on Holy Thursday: “I’ve done it that way for 34 years.”

He has also apologized to women for the sermon _ “I didn’t mean it THAT way” _ in which he listed feminism right after the drug culture and the sexual revolution and just before the breakdown of authority and divorce on a list of the spoiled inheritance of baby boomers, whom he described as “religious illiterates.”

This response, in the archdiocesan newspaper, The Pilot, reminds one of the old pastor’s advice to a jittery young priest before his first sermon, “Take a drink first and I’ll listen from the sacristy and review you afterwards.”

The pastor began his review with encouragement: “You were great,” quickly adding, “just a few things to note. Peter is known as the Rock, not Rocky. The Blessed Mother’s name is Mary, not Marian. And Cain slew Abel, he didn’t beat the hell out of him with a stick.”

Had our old pastor read the column after hearing the sermon, what advice would he give the archbishop? “You were great,” he would begin. “Just a few things to note”:

“Never begin an apology with a complaint that `being archbishop of Boston is like living in a fishbowl made out of magnifying glass.’ People have real troubles, they don’t want to hear about yours, especially since you seem to enjoy portraying yourself as the humble monk in the big city. You are not attention averse, as they say, or you would shave that beard and lose the sandals.

“Never repeat the charge. Don’t blow on a fire that is almost out. Your people are veterans of the sermon wars and long ago learned how to tune out all the mispoken and ill-prepared words they have heard from pulpits. They will put it behind them quietly but you must do that as well.

“Don’t give excuses that get you in deeper, as by writing that `Feminism is a very elastic term and I did not try to define it or categorize it.’ Give us a break. People want to help you out of the quicksand, so don’t pull them in after you by claiming that your `comment was construed as an attack on feminism.’ You are just reminding people that it is difficult to construe it in any other way.

“Do you think you convince people that you are really pro-feminist by saying you once co-chaired with Gloria Steinem a government committee on the wages of domestic workers? Big deal. Let your record of having women as chancellors when you were bishop in the Virgin Islands and Palm Beach, Fla., speak for itself. Better still, let these women speak on your behalf or you make yourself sound like what you are not _ an owner of slaves who claimed to treat them like family.

“Ask good Catholic women how much it helps to claim that Pope John Paul II has spoken positively about feminism or for you to celebrate Dorothy Day and Mother Teresa when, if they had been at your Cathedral on Holy Thursday, you wouldn’t have washed their feet either.

“You ordinarily sound like a man of conviction, so pledging that you will seek guidance from the Vatican on whether you should wash women’s feet makes you seem, despite your claims to value women in the church, incapable of resolving a simple pastoral challenge without first asking the pope.”

Mary Jane England, president of Regis College, which O’Malley is scheduled to visit on May 15, places it into perspective: “The Catholic community has some very serious problems to work on, and we can’t be distracted by ideologies or rubrics.”

Perhaps the archbishop can let a woman’s words be the last on a matter that he is unfortunately making it hard for everybody to forget.

DEA/JL END KENNEDY