Big Man in a Long Red Robe

TO the many who knew him and the millions who watched him from afar, the life of Boston's Richard Cardinal Cushing was a montage of endearing and memorable vignettes. In some of them he was the Populist Prince, handing out miniature liquor bottles at an old folks' home ("Holy water! That's what it is! But don't sprinkle it around. Pour it down!"). In others he was the Court Clown mugging shamelessly in a sailor's hat or a baseball cap. On a cold November day in 1963 he was the nation's own Job, his prayer cracking with grief as he called on the angels to carry his "dear Jack" to Paradise.

Behind the many roles was a man solid and roughhewn. The son of an Irish-born blacksmith, Cushing had a face like a Connemara bogman and a voice like coal rattling down a chute into a South Boston basement. He seemed not so much to live life as to wage it, suggesting that the years were too short for what he had to do. Only his huge energy obscured the truth about how long, and how seriously he had been ill. For years he fought off migraine headaches, ulcers, asthma and emphysema--the latter two so debilitating that he had to keep oxygen at his bedside. Cancer was also an old enemy and, as it turned out, the final one. When he died last week at 75, the disease had so ravaged Cushing's 6-ft. frame that he had wasted from a robust 200 Ibs. to a mere 140 Ibs.

One-Day Ransom. Less than two months ago, in a dramatic changing of the guard (TIME, Sept. 21), Cushing turned over his diocese to the Most Reverend Humberto S. Medeiros, an activist bishop who had previously headed the diocese of Brownsville, Texas. "The will to live will be gone," predicted an old friend. Said another: "He's not able to do anything else except be Archbishop of Boston."

Yet Cushing never sought the role that he retained for 26 years. From the beginning, he wanted to be a missionary. In 1962, he tried to resign in order to finish his career in the missions of Latin America. Instead, he remained a founder--and funder--of mission work, even establishing his own Society of St. James the Apostle for work in Latin America. His ability to raise money for the church at home and abroad was prodigious--a total of more than $100 million in 26 years. Just before Christmas in 1961, he raised $2,900,000 in cash in one day to ransom the Cuban prisoners captured in "dear Jack's" Bay of Pigs invasion.

Part of Cushing's ability to sell a cause was surely his own quiet example of personal austerity: he joked about his official residence being "the biggest joint on Commonwealth Avenue," but his personal life within it was simple and frugal. Once he amazed a visitor by proudly showing off a $3 pair of black loafers he had picked up at Filene's basement. Part of his effectiveness, too, was Cushing's broad, transparent humanity, which seemed to embrace not only every faith but even, on occasion, rather conflicting ideologies. "He had a good word to say for everyone who came down the pike," explained an admirer in discussing Cushing's mixed bag of enthusiasms. He was an early, lifelong member of the N.A.A.C.P., and the first Catholic prelate to urge his flock to attend Billy Graham's crusades. He could also praise the anti-Communism of the John Birch Society and write a glowing foreword to a book by the director of the Moral Re-Armament movement.

God Knows. He had an invincible, perhaps sentimental belief that people could be wrong but not really bad, and that, in any event, it was not the place of one human to judge another. When some Catholic churchmen criticized Jacqueline Kennedy's marriage to the divorced Aristotle Onassis, it was Cushing who chided them. "Only God," he said, "knows who is a sinner and who is not."

Rightly but a shade too formally, some Bostonians called him "the Cardinal of Charity." That he was; and for it, both Catholics and non-Catholics in the U.S. honored Cushing with an affection exceeded only by their love for Pope John XXIII. The affection followed him everywhere, but nowhere did it surround him more warmly than on his visit to the annual Christmas party at St. Coletta's, an institution for "exceptional" children he founded in Hanover, Mass.

The cardinal never missed the party, even putting on his "red dress" for the occasion because the children liked it. One small boy at the school may have spoken for much of the world when a radio reporter asked him to describe Santa Claus. "He's big, and he wears a long red robe," said the child. "And," the boy continued, talking out of the side of his mouth in a raspy voice, "he talks like this."

Fittingly, Richard Cardinal Cushing was buried last Saturday in a simple crypt in the chapel at St. Coletta's, "facing the children," as he had wished.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.