The Unlikely Cardinal

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From the pulpit where he stood one day last week, Richard James Cardinal Cushing, 68, looked down not at the familiar Irish faces of his own Boston congregation but rather into the docile and questioning gaze of brown Peruvian eyes. The occasion was the blessing of a new brick-and-concrete Roman Catholic church in a slum suburb of Lima.

"Mindful of the fact that you live in an agricultural country," rumbled Cushing, "I presume you know what an ass is. We read in the New Testament that our blessed Lord rode on an ass in triumph into the city of Jerusalem. Today the Lord rides on another ass: I myself.

"I can't even talk your language," said the cardinal humbly (a translator relayed his words in Spanish). "I know only one language--the language of the heart--that is, the language of love. And I give you all my bountiful measure of love."

Crusty & Contrary. Cushing this month is visiting the churches and the 135 priests of the Society of St. James the Apostle, which he founded six years ago in alarmed awareness that Latin America, where priests are fewest in proportion to professed Catholics, is perilously open to Communist (particularly Red Chinese) appeals. Through the lowering heat of coastal Ecuador and the wintry mist of Peru, he worked until exhaustion, made worse by his bad health, left him unable to talk. He heartened priests, preached long sermons, blessed edifices of various kinds, and everywhere took delight in children. At one town he poured milk into the mugs of several hundred assembled urchins. In a penniless orphanage he committed himself to vast purchases of ice cream for kids, and, reminded that he must always raise money for the missionary society and much more besides, reduced some little girls to giggles by saying, "If you ever marry a millionaire, introduce him to me."

One symbolic act of his visit was a simple inspection of his mission's half-finished Church of the Virgin of the Door in Peru's boomtown, anchovy-fishing city of Chimbote. In that church the altar is placed to let the priest face the congregation, in contrast to centuries of practice and in compliance with Catholicism's current aggiornamento. Cushing has encouraged all of his missionary priests to stay in tune with the times. For if there is a bit of the Last Hurrah in Boston's crusty and contrary Cardinal Cushing, there is also a generous measure of the new spirit of Pope John XXIII. He personally illustrates the stirring of that placid giant of Roman Catholicism, the church in the U.S.

Nuns on Picket Lines. This surge of renewal is more concerned with the structure of the church than the substance of doctrine, more with practical questions of morality and Christian living than with abstract theological problems. Renewal, American-style, deals with freedom within the church, with the kind of rebellion that does not end in the classic "leaving the church."

In Los Angeles last June, a young parish priest called for the removal of his archbishop--criticizing "the church of silence" autocratically ruled by James Francis Cardinal Mclntyre--and got strong support from a few Catholic lay organizations. The Catholic monthly Jubilee has published dozens of letters by priests and laymen asking for a re-examination of the church's stand on birth control. Nuns and priests are no longer strangers to civil rights picket lines. With the approval of Oklahoma's bishop, two Catholic parishes have joined Tulsa's previously all-Protestant Council of Churches. A liturgically reforming priest in Detroit says, with only a touch of hyperbole: "Just walking in off the street, you couldn't tell the difference between our Mass here and a Protestant service."

In large measure, the American Catholic renewal can be credited to spiritual fallout from the Vatican Council and the church-wide modernization unleashed by Pope John. Signs of change, in the case of the American Catholic church, are also signs of maturation.

Until 1908, the U.S. was in Vatican eyes still technically a mission land, and even after that, to many Protestants, Catholicism remained a second-class faith for third-class citizens--the Irish, Polish, German, Hungarian and Italian immigrants who brought their religion with them in the steerage. Now Roman Catholicism has become by far the nation's largest and richest Christian denomination. The latest edition of the Official Catholic Directory says that there are 44.8 million Roman Catholics in the U.S. Actually, there may be 4,000,000 to 5,000,000 more than that, for, as one bishop points out, the directory's figures come from parish priests who underestimate the size of their flocks to keep diocesan assessments low.

The nation's 244 prelates can summon the services of 57,000 priests and 180,000 sisters. Although the church suffers more dropouts than it likes to admit (largely among Italians and Latin Americans, and among Catholics who marry outside the faith), and the number of converts is declining, the losses are more than made up by the more than 1,000,000 babies baptized as Catholics every year. According to Chicago's Priest-Sociologist Andrew Greeley, "the religious practice of American Catholics is far and away the best of any industrial nation in the world." One survey has indicated that 72% of U.S. Catholics go to Mass every Sunday, as canon law requires them to; 45% receive Communion at least once a month, and 66% go to confession at least twice a year.

Renewal Elite. The truest sign of American Catholic maturity is the development and vociferous presence of something that has been rather grandly called "the renewal elite." It includes bishops, priests, seminarians and sisters, but its driving force is a young, college-trained laity that accepts the church's essential mysteries and matters of faith while questioning the authoritarian way moral theologians reduce these dogmas to terms of practical behavior. As one California Jesuit puts it, "The catechism answers don't satisfy any more --thank God."

In parish life, renewal means a comprehensible liturgy with parishioner participation instead of novenas, family study groups instead of membership in the Holy Name Society (an organization formed in part to cut down profanity). It means the displacement of what Layman Michael Novak calls "nonhistorical orthodoxy"--the abstract, rationalistic theology that has dominated Catholic thinking since the Council of Trent--by a Gospel-centered Catholicism that is open to accept the insights of Freud, Camus, and even Marx.

To the renewal elite, the church is not only a juridical institution governed by the Pope and the bishops, but also the "people of God." Such Catholics feel free to challenge betrayals of the moral law--segregation or political expedience--even when they are tolerated by priests and bishops on grounds of prudence.

Conservative Backlash. Inevitably, millions of U.S. Catholics are indifferent to this kind of renewal--the born-and-bred bead-sayers for whom faith is simply a comfortably furnished apartment of the mind. Inevitably, too, there is a "renewal backlash" of Catholics who like the church the way they find it, and look upon its unchanging doctrines and structures as pillars of security in an age of flux. Such ecclesiastical conservatives complain that Mass in English will turn them into "Bapto-Catholics," and look upon the church's denunciation of contraception as a sign of strength rather than rigidity. "I left the Baptist Church for Roman Catholicism, and now it is being dismantled all around me," says one Denver housewife. "At the rate they are going, it will look like the Baptist Church before long."

By temperament and training, most American bishops are inclined to share such conservative forebodings, and the extent to which Catholic renewal is encouraged varies considerably from diocese to diocese. Los Angeles' Mclntyre openly supports the status quo. Francis Cardinal Spellman of New York objects to "change for change's sake," and classifies most change as just that.

Chicago's reclusive Albert Meyer is regarded as a moderate who promotes liturgical reform. St. Louis' quiet-spoken Joseph Elmer Cardinal Ritter is a proponent of change; his archdiocese will be the setting of the first English Mass in the U.S. on Aug. 24, when more than 10,000 priests and laymen will gather for the annual North American Liturgical Week. But church renewal has been most actively supported by the man whose episcopal motto is Ut Cognoscant Te (That they may know thee), Boston's Cardinal Cushing.

A Round of Beer. Cushing is an unlikely sort of cardinal to be encouraging the renewal of American Catholicism, but that is partly because he is an unlikely cardinal. He is the only life member of the N.A.A.C.P. who has publicly endorsed the aims of the John Birch Society. A doer rather than an original thinker, Cushing openly confesses his inability to follow theological argument; yet his lengthy pastoral letters are often eloquent. He is a tireless fund-raiser out of the mold of brick-and-mortar prelates, but his greatness is measured in intangibles: his extraordinary love for people, the good will he has fostered among men of other faiths.

He once entertained a delegation of visiting New York police by stalking into a tavern, miter and all, and ordering a round of beer for his guests; another time, after blessing the fishing fleet at Gloucester, he vaulted aboard one ship and asked the captain to sail him home to Boston. At amusement parks he buys candy kisses for nuns and shamelessly employs a rather widely used gag as he tells them that "they're the only kisses you'll ever get." Hardly a day goes by that Boston Catholics can pick up their papers without seeing a new picture of their cardinal dancing a jig in an old folks' home or mugging outrageously beneath some improbable hat. Last year in Rome, when President Kennedy visited the North American College, Cushing was on hand to greet him, with a group of sobersided clerics looking on. Instead of offering his episcopal ring to be kissed, Cushing squared off, aimed a mock right hook at the President's solar plexus and bellowed: "Hi, Jack!"

Although he celebrates Mass with lengthy reverence, Cushing has little use for the trappings of his office. He wears Jack Kennedy's dog tag (a gift from Jacqueline Kennedy), but rarely wears a pectoral cross: "I have crosses enough without carrying one adorned with jewels." Dressed in his red cardinal's robes--he calls them his "glad rags"--he will march up to a mob of children at a parochial school and say: "How are you, children? It's Santa Glaus!" When he welcomes visitors to his stately residence on Commonwealth Avenue in suburban Brighton, he waves a hand at the rich furnishings and cracks: "What do you think of the joint?" Cushing loves to tell stories on himself--such as when he was summoned to give the last rites to a man at the scene of an accident. "Do you believe in God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost?" he asked. "Father, here I am dying," the man replied, "and you bother me with riddles."

"Hozahner in Excelsis." Malicious rumor has it that some Boston confessors require penitents, as reparation for their sins, to sit through one of the cardinal's sermons, which seem to be measured in units of eternity rather than time. Millions of Americans caught their first glimpse of the Cushing style at the 1961 presidential inauguration, when his windy, ear-shattering invocation was interrupted by a fire in the loudspeaker wiring. One viewer protesting the length of the prayer wrote to Cushing that the smoke represented "the Devil asking for equal time." Now Cushing says sadly: "I thought it was a pretty good prayer, but less than three years later Jack was killed. So it didn't seem to do any good."

Cushing's stentorian, gravelly baritone took on a rare human appeal last year when he presided ("Hozahner in excelsis") at John Kennedy's funeral and steadied the President's widow beside the grave in Arlington National Cemetery. Says Robert Kennedy: "The President felt closer to him than to any other clergyman." Cushing, in turn, regards himself as a "spiritual father" to the Kennedy family. He celebrated the nuptial Mass at the wedding of Jack and Jackie, baptized Bobby's son Chris, and about once a month visits ailing old Joe "to tell him newsy things."

A product of South Boston's melting pot ghetto, Cushing feels a Bostonian kinship to the Kennedys. The cardinal's father, after emigrating from County Cork in 1880, became a blacksmith for the old Boston Elevated. "We were ordinary people, but comfortable," Cushing recalls.

He attended public grammar schools, got his first taste of Catholic education when he entered the second-year class at the Jesuits' Boston College High School. "I was as rough as any of them, and they were pretty rough," the cardinal recalls. Actually, he seems to have been a devout and hard-working student; twice he thought of joining the Jesuits before he entered the archdiocesan seminary of St. John's after completing his sophomore year at Boston College.

"Originally, I wanted to be a politician," the cardinal says. "I used to make money speaking for politicians from the back of wagons. I spoke for Jim Curley. I spoke for the suffragettes and the anti-suffragettes--anyone who would pay me. This was all outdoors--that's how I developed this present style of talking indoors. Then the priest said, 'If you do any more speaking for politicians or any other cause, I'm never going to give you a letter to the seminary.'

Taking Heaven by Storm. Ordained in 1921, Cushing spent his first eleven months as a parish priest. Then he had an interview with his archbishop, princely old William Cardinal O'Connell.* Brashly declaring that he wanted to "take heaven by storm," Cushing asked to be sent to the foreign missions. "Your foreign mission will be where I send you," the cardinal answered, and eventually named him chief local fundraiser for the Society for the Propagation of the Faith.

Cushing handled his job with such zeal that O'Connell made him an auxiliary bishop in 1939 to succeed Francis Spellman, who had been named Archbishop of New York. When O'Connell died in April 1944, Cushing was made temporary administrator of the archdiocese, and later that year he was formally installed as archbishop, thanks in large part to the intervention of Spellman. Friends then and now, Cushing and Spellman went through a long decade of cool relations. "The difference was to a large degree temperamental--the difference between a roughie [Cushing] and a smoothie," explains one veteran of church politics. "The smoothie thought he could tell the roughie what to do--and he couldn't." Opposition of New York's cardinal helped keep Cushing from winning his red hat until 1958.

Since 1944, his archdiocese has grown to 1,767,000 Catholics, and is the third largest in the country, after Chicago and New York. To serve this flock, Cushing has welcomed more than 60 different religious orders into Boston, and given so much help to the Jesuits that he has become one of their few benefactors known as "founders"; when he dies, every priest in the Jesuits' New England Province must offer three Masses for the repose of his soul.

Archdiocesan officials estimate that he has been responsible for at least $250 million worth of construction, including 120 elementary and high schools, 86 new parishes and four hospitals. Much of this he has managed with a financial skill worthy of J. Paul Getty. He called in all the surplus funds of his parishes and set up his own banking system, organized an insurance plan for archdiocesan property that has saved the parishes $10 million so far.

Nickels & Dimes. Cushing's fame as a fund-raiser is so great that one letter to his residence came addressed to "Come On Wealth" Avenue. He takes in and gives out about $20,000 a day. "No combination of 20 U.S. bishops has raised as much as Cushing has in nickels and dimes and half-dollars for the mission," says one bishop. Most of Cushing's donations come from what he calls "the mighty mites" of average Catholics, although he has a few tame millionaires whom he taps regularly, such as the Jewish couple who own Rockingham Park race track in New Hampshire. Last year he performed a spectacular feat that had nothing to do with the church: raising $1,000,000 in a few days, at the request of Bobby Kennedy, to ransom the Cuban prisoners captured after the Bay of Pigs.

Cushing works so hard at raising money that some laymen complain he thinks of nothing else. His capacity for work especially astonishes his doctor, since he suffers from asthma, emphysema, ulcers and migraine headaches, has had operations to remove a cancerous kidney and the prostate gland. He eats lightly ("I have to--I bleed"), sleeps with an oxygen tank beside his bed. "It is the wolf that keeps me on the go," he explains, "particularly the wolf at someone else's door."

Boston sees only half of what Cushing raises. He is a generous contributor to the Vatican, and offered to pay for a U.N.-like simultaneous translation system for the Ecumenical Council (the Pope declined). He is contributing $200,000 to renovate the Church of the Holy Spirit in Pope John's home town of Bergamo, $220,000 to build a cathedral for Laurean Cardinal Rugambwa of Tanganyika, $1,000,000 for Fu-jen University in Formosa. Cushing's generosity has made him at least as well known abroad as Spellman, and he collects decorations and honorary degrees from grateful recipients "in bunches like bananas." One of the most recent is the Grand Cross of the Order of Isabella the Catholic, which Spain gave him after he raised $5,000 for the orphaned children of Spanish sailors who died when their ship was lost at sea. "I thought Franco might make me a matador, or something," Cushing says.

The Pastoral Revolution. In earlier years, Cushing was in many ways conservative and narrow. In 1948 he denounced what he said was a conspiracy of "birth controllers, abortionists and mercy killers," and in 1949 he attacked Protestants and Other Americans United for Separation of Church and State as "a refined form of the Ku Klux Klan." He fought with Harvard's former President James Bryant Conant when Conant suggested that parochial and other independent schools are divisive, and he deplored secular universities. "There are too many instances where Catholic students have lost their faith and Americanism at these institutions," he roared.

But an instinct for renewal--first shown many years ago when he began visiting Protestant churches and Jewish synagogues--has always lived in Cushing, and Pope John gave it form. Partly because of his health and partly because "I can't understand the Latin," Cushing spent only three weeks at each session of the Vatican Council, but no other U.S. bishop seems to have caught more of its spirit. Nor is there any Catholic prelate who grasped better the kind of pastoral revolution planned by the man whom Cushing always calls "good Pope John." "He was the only man who ever understood me," the cardinal says, "and I don't understand myself."

One reason that Cushing has proved so open to church renewal is his freedom from what one reform-minded layman calls "Chancery Catholicism." "Cushing doesn't give a damn for canon law or moral theology," says a Jesuit from the College of the Holy Cross. "He has no tolerance for any kind of legalism in the church." Although many of his priests are perfectly content with a "service-station liturgy" in Latin, Cushing has required every parish to install the dialogue Mass, and openly champions the new English translation of much of the Mass, which will be introduced across the nation on Nov. 29. He also runs a "delayed vocations" seminary for older men who want to become priests. He pleads with the laity to be more active in church affairs. "If you don't, who will?" he asks. "You see the deadwood I have here in the clergy."

Champion of Freedom. Cushing has become a champion of freedom within the church. He tacitly allowed Dr. John Rock, a communicant of the Boston archdiocese, to argue for the moral licitness of a birth-control pill. He welcomed Swiss Theologian Hans Kueng, one of Europe's most advanced Catholic thinkers, to Boston, and wrote a preface for Kueng's latest book, Structures of the Church. Cushing says that the Index of Forbidden Books is "meaningless," and "they should get rid of the whole thing." He wants to drop the promises that non-Catholic partners in mixed marriages must make to raise their children as Catholics; to ask a believing Protestant to "sign on the dotted line" strikes Cushing as a violation of conscience.

His reasoning is that Catholics "must not just respect but esteem" the religious values of others; he has blossomed as the most convinced and convincing ecumenist in the Catholic Church. With the rector by his side, he has knelt in prayer at Trinity Episcopal Church in Boston, and he claims to have visited 80 Protestant churches. Last month he delivered an address to a Greek Orthodox conference in Denver.

He believes that the task of Christians now is not to join in one church but simply to understand one another. His distrust of Harvard having long since died, he helped organize a Catholic-Protestant ecumenical dialogue there last year with Augustin Cardinal Bea of Rome's Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity as chief speaker. Cushing is trying to raise $1,000,000 for a permanent ecumenical study center in Boston, and has given $100,000 to the Greek Orthodox seminary in Brookline.

Like Confessing on TV. He is largely indifferent to the Vatican Council debates on such weighty theological issues as collegiality of bishops or whether Scripture and tradition constitute one or two sources of divine revelation. Much more important to him is the shortage of priests. He tried but failed to get permission from Rome to confer priesthood on a married man, Lutheran Convert Ernest Beck, who was later ordained in Mainz, Germany (TIME, July 10). Currently, Cushing is sponsoring the priestly studies of a married former Episcopal priest. But he does not favor ordaining women. "I've supported many lost causes in my lifetime," he told one group of nuns, "but this one is not for me. I could never confess my sins to a woman; it would be like doing it on television."

The cardinal, says one Boston layman, "is a very complex man. He has you cheering for him one moment and he sort of embarrasses you the next." Cause of the embarrassment is what a member of Cushing's chancery delicately calls his "follies of the heart." Although many bishops have denounced Moral Re-Armament as a false kind of super-religion, Cushing has written a glowing foreword to a book of essays by M.R.A.'s director, British Journalist Peter Howard. When CBS in 1961 produced a documentary that showed Boston cops entering a bookie joint, Cushing--who was worried about the effect of the program on the morale of the policemen's families--went to a policemen's ball and said, "Someone betrayed us!" Cushing has declared that he would accept a Negro as an auxiliary bishop, long ago outlawed segregation from Boston's Catholic institutions. But he has been slow to help eradicate the anti-Negro prejudice that lingers on in South Boston.

From Canon Law to l-Thou. "Cushing fits in with the new spirit," says William Storey, associate professor of history at Pittsburgh's Duquesne University, "but I wonder if he realizes that the whole process must go a lot farther." Going a lot farther would include approval of married deacons, lay election of bishops, general adoption of civilian dress in place of clerical black and Roman collars, the abolition of such medieval practices as ring kissing and ermine-trimmed robes for cardinals, the right of Catholics to contract mixed marriages before Protestant ministers. Perhaps the greatest possibility is that of a person-centered theology of marriage that owes more to Martin Buber's I-Thou relationship than to canon law --and thus might resolve the most troubling moral issue that faces U.S. Catholics today: birth control.

Recently, Pope Paul VI announced that the church's condemnation of the birth-control pill, which dates from a 1958 statement of Pius XII, was being restudied in Rome--thereby implying the possibility that some change in the church's position might be forthcoming. Many Catholics would regard any redefinition of a doctrinal stand as a betrayal, and Monsignor George Kelly, New York's archdiocesan expert on family problems, has written every U.S. diocese asking bishops to petition the Pope to hold fast to Pius' teaching.

Nonetheless, the Rev. Raymond Potvin, sociology professor at Catholic University, says that it may be time to "start applauding the heroism of those who limit their families for the sake of building a better society." Priests, themselves celibate, "talk about 'sacrifice' as if it were giving up smoking for Lent," says Novelist-Critic Wilfrid Sheed. It is estimated that about half of married Catholics use some form of contraceptive some time during their lives; a Detroit priest reports that couples "come back again, month after month, with the same confession." Parish priests worry about the number of couples who leave the church or stop receiving the sacraments over this issue.

At least two theologians have written in diocesan papers that since the question of the morality of the pill has been reopened by a number of reputable scholars. Catholic couples are free to use the pills on the principle that lex dubia non obligat (a doubtful law does not obligate). "I cannot in good conscience do anything to enforce the church's position because I don't believe it," says one Kansas priest. When couples confess to using contraceptives, says a priest in Chicago, "I don't tell them to say 200 Our Fathers. I just don't say much at all."

Crisis of Authority? Debates over birth control--and such questions as the role of parochial schools--have been primarily raised by Catholic laymen. Once notable for his quiet acceptance of church discipline, today's Catholic, says Frank Begley, a lay official of St. Louis' Catholic school system, "is twice as intelligent, three times bettereducated, and he doesn't look to the priest as the end-all." He is ready to challenge the dicta of old-line authoritarian pastors. "What we really need," says one Miami layman, "is freedom to dissent from the Pope."

Some church leaders believe that American Catholicism is heading for a crisis in authority. Many bishops are worried about the number of potentially good priests who leave seminaries rather than submit to picayune rules and a dry, unappealing curriculum. Younger priests chafe under an archaic system that puts them completely at the mercy of pastors. "Some of the bitchiest old women in the U.S. are wearing cassocks, not dresses," says a Colorado priest. There are reportedly between 4,000 and 5,000 priests who have left the clergy in the U.S. with frustration high among their reasons. In today's age of the layman, there is also the danger of anticlericalism, which, says Edward Marciniak, an executive director of the Chicago Commission on Human Relations and a leading layman, "comes when the layman feels he knows more than the clergy."

Dying under these challenges is a church that was content to see its members "hatched, matched and dispatched," and preferred that they ask few questions about their faith. Emerging as a renewed church that claims to be the mystical body of Christ, it will appear more credible to men as it sheds no longer relevant trappings of past ages and what Hans Kueng calls its aspects of unfreedom. In this emerging church, Cushing neither deserves nor gets any credit as originator, rebel, theologian, theoretician or organizer of the change. But he does stand out as the intuitive old party in a high place who gave renewal a hearty push just because it seemed the right thing to do.

* Irreverently known in Boston as "Gangplank Willie," for his many trips to Bermuda.

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