Change of the Guard

Standing at John F. Kennedy's inaugural platform in 1961, he delighted the President and TV audience by steadfastly continuing his invocation after smoke began to pour from the lectern in front of him. He was cast in a more somber role in 1963, when he conducted John Kennedy's funeral Mass in Washington. He rushed to the Kennedys' side at the time of Bobby's assassination. He comforted Rose during Joseph Sr.'s long illness and again at his death, and staunchly defended Jackie after her marriage to Aristotle Onassis.

For all this. Richard Joseph Cardinal Gushing, the third Archbishop of Boston, was far from a clerical camp follower of the Kennedys. He was one of the most unusual prelates in the history of the American Catholic Church. His instincts flowed from the heart rather than the head. When he took over the see of Boston from autocratic William Cardinal O'Connell in 1944, it was much like Harry Truman's taking over from Franklin Roosevelt.

He was an ecumenist long before the word became popular. At Vatican II, he attracted worldwide attention when his speech in support of the council document on religious liberty for all --including atheists--was hailed by the assembled churchmen with a burst of forbidden applause. Then, typically, he walked out on the council when it went on too long, claiming that he had more important things to do in Boston. For these reasons--and for many others --Gushing has become perhaps the best known of the American cardinals.

Last week, according to his own time table, Gushing at 75 resigned his post as spiritual head of 1,900,000 Catholics. To replace him, the Vatican named the Most Rev. Humberto S. Medeiros. a little-known bishop of a small South Texas diocese. For the first time in 124 years, Boston will have a non-Irish prelate at its helm. It is more than a mere change of the guard. Gushing, despite his progressive programs, basically represents the traditional church, while Medeiros is symbolic of the more involved social activism that is sweeping the church today. The new head of the Boston archdiocese was born in the Portuguese Azores in the North Atlantic. He emigrated to Massachusetts with his family in 1931 at age 15, and took a job sweeping floors in a local textile mill for 620 a day, studying English in his spare time. After graduating from high school in Fall River, Mass., Medeiros decided to enter the priesthood. He was ordained in Washington, D.C., and took an M.A. in philosophy in 1942, then a Ph.D. in sacred theology in 1952 at Catholic University. He did pastoral duties at his home parish in Fall River before being consecrated a bishop and transferred to Brownsville, Texas, in 1966.

Conscientious Activist. In Brownsville, Medeiros emerged as a practicing liberal in the best sense of the word. His appointment to the Rio Grande Valley came at the time of a threatened farm workers' strike. Since many of the 250,000 members of his diocese were Mexican-American migrant workers, Bishop Medeiros quickly plunged in and actively supported the workers' demands for a $1.25-an-hour minimum wage. At the same time, he spoke out against an economic system that "considers profit the key motive for economic progress, competition the maximum law of economics and private ownership of the means of production an absolute right that carries no corresponding social obligations."

Medeiros sold the bishop's limousine and now rattles around in a three-year-old sedan. He lives in one room of the Brownsville bishop's palace, having turned the rest of the residence into a dormitory for visiting priests. During the harvest season, he often travels with the migrant workers and celebrates Masses in the fields. His experience with oppressed minorities will stand him in good stead in the Boston area, where there has been a rapid growth in both the black and Spanish-speaking communities and where the plight of New England migrant workers is only now receiving widespread attention.

If Medeiros symbolizes the newer conscience of the church, Cardinal Gushing is representative of the more established order of things religious. It is an order that is rapidly changing, and Gushing is thus caught between the conservatism of his young days and the liberalism of the modern church. "As a theologian, he is not a true liberal at heart," says his close friend, Msgr. George Casey of Lexington, Mass. But "he recognized Vatican II as the wave of the future and accepted it." As if to symbolize these inner contrasts, the cardinal could laud the John Birch Society and at the same time hold a life membership in the N.A.A.C.P. He is an ardent antiCommunist, but this summer he came out strongly for U.S. withdrawal from Viet Nam.

Human Qualities. In the 26 years that he held the post. Cardinal Gushing brought extraordinary drive and energy to his job. A compulsive builder in the brick-and-mortar school, he established 87 new parishes and oversaw the construction of 15 high schools. He collected millions of dollars for causes here and abroad, including $2,900,000 to ransom prisoners after the Bay of Pigs invasion. His great enthusiasm --among many--was Latin America, to which he dispatched hundreds of missionaries and millions of dollars.

Beyond all his accomplishments, however, the attributes of Cardinal Gushing that Boston and the world will long remember are his intensely human qualities. He is a man who loves to clown, tell abominable jokes, wear funny hats, play baseball, go on outings with children. He calls his scarlet cardinal's robes his "glad rags" and usually answers his own phone in his well-known gravelly voice. Every year, dressed in those glad rags, he has danced an Irish jig with the aged, whom he loved to visit.

The years have taken their toll, and the strain shows in Cushing's craggy, furrowed face. He suffers from asthma, emphysema, ulcers and cancer. As the longtime spiritual adviser of the Kennedy family, he has been devastated by their tragedies. "It seems that all my troubles have come in the autumn of my life,'' he lamented after Joe Kennedy's death. "I now feel alone and abandoned." Appropriately enough, one of the most moving tributes upon the cardinal's resignation came from Senator Edward Kennedy, speaking on behalf of the family: "For three-quarters of a century his life has been a light in a world that cries out for illumination. He will never have to account for his stewardship, for if his goodness is not known to God, no one's ever will be."

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