Cardinal’s Last Days Offer a Lesson in Life

The cardinal is dying, and he is dying a remarkable death.

Cardinal Joseph L. Bernardin, leader of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago, is gravely ill, so close now to the end that when word of his condition on Wednesday reached bishops at a national meeting in Washington, the group bowed as one to pray for him.

Even until that very moment, Bernardin has spent months teaching his last lesson by sharing his final earthly days with the entire world.

The cardinal learned in August that the pancreatic cancer he had thought vanquished by surgery in fact had reappeared. Five growing tumors pressed on the capsule encasing his liver. At 68, he had less than a year of life left.

“Well,” he calmly told his oncologist, Ellen Gaynor. “This changes everything.”

He paused, then continued: “I have the opportunity to live what I’ve been telling people . . . that we have to look at death as a friend.”

A bishop of national stature for decades, he is using his most private journey to help everyone face what most of us avoid: the mortality of each man and woman.

The result has been an extraordinary fusing between a religious figure and his flock, a flock extending far beyond the 2.3 million Catholics of Cook and Lake counties in the state of Illinois. His unself-conscious references to death have made people think about it, talk about it, and with him feel mourning mixed with uplift--even joy.

Into microphones at university forums, church conferences and prayer services, Bernardin has spoken of his struggles with farewells and his embrace of God’s will.

As he faded, he was writing--in longhand and by dictating to a recorder--a slim book about his experiences.

At press conferences about his health, he has willingly answered questions that his horrified staff considered intrusive and rude.

He has visited, written to, telephoned and prayed for hundreds of astonished cancer patients.

He has put his affairs in order, relinquishing control of cherished projects. “I don’t want to leave anyone in the lurch,” he told his biographer and friend, Eugene Kennedy, about a month ago.

He has even displayed a puckish side. A few weeks ago, when Bernardin visited St. Agatha’s--among the poorest of Chicago’s 377 parishes--the crowd, 800 strong, sang a hymn titled “Trouble Don’t Last Always.”

“Yeah,” the cardinal said to the parish priest, Father Mike Ivers, when he recognized the tune. “But it comes back.”

The people, high and low, have been touched in turn.

He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom at the White House. His name shines at night on the front wall of a suburban cancer center, rededicated in his honor last month.

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An organization of African American preachers paid him tribute at a Baptist church on Tuesday night. A rabbi, a friend, is arranging a memorial for Chicago’s Jewish community to say goodbye once the cardinal’s body is lying in state.

A condemned man named Raymond Lee Stewart, a Muslim, read about the cardinal’s own death sentence and asked the prelate to visit him at Stateville Correctional Center in Joliet on execution day. Bernardin did so. It was a first for him.

Together, two men with little time recited the Prayer of St. Francis: It is in pardoning that we are pardoned. It is in dying that we are born to eternal life. As Stewart told his story, he gestured with his right hand; he clutched the cardinal through the holding cell’s bars with his left.

He was not the only one to cling. Wherever Bernardin has gone, he has felt gentle strokes and taps on his back, his shoulder, his elbow. He finally realized that no one was trying to capture his attention. The crowds just wanted to physically acknowledge his presence.

Those opportunities are gone. The fatigue burrows deep now; rest brings no relief. He runs a constant low-grade fever. Although spared the most excruciating pain that his disease can cause--because it was diagnosed early enough that the primary tumor could be removed--he nonetheless aches in his middle abdomen, back and shoulder.

He has not concealed that he suffers. A staffer at Loyola University Medical Center, where Gaynor treats the cardinal, spied him approaching one late summer day. He asked her young son: “What’s your name?”

“My name’s Tony,” the boy replied. “What’s yours?”

“My name is Joseph,” said the cardinal. He asked the child: “Could I have a hug? I could use a hug today.”

He told 800 priests gathered in downtown’s Holy Name Cathedral: “My brothers, I am in the midst of this ‘letting go.’ It is like the cross: Sometimes it is sweet and easy; sometimes it is very difficult.” Although his faith has not wavered, Bernardin told the assemblage that “human emotions can be quite fickle, as all of you so well know. But there is no reason to hide those emotions.”

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During a late-evening newscast after a Bernardin speech, a WBBM-TV anchorwoman asked reporter Jay Levine a question that has become routine: How is the cardinal feeling? “So-so, he told me,” Levine answered. “Tired.”

Once, at home, Bernardin fell on the stairs and couldn’t reach the cane he now leans on. The walls of the old house are so thick that no one heard his cries for help. He crawled along the corridor to his room.

Despite such trials, “I don’t think he’s ever lost his temper,” Kennedy said.

Indeed, his closest associates say his serenity is often beautiful to behold. Bernardin truly believes that he will be joining his God, and it shows.

“It’s like he’s falling in love,” said Father Michael Place, the cardinal’s personal theologian. “He’s been transformed.”

“He’s like an Easter candle burning down,” Kennedy said. “Lit from within.”

His last priorities are clear, and they are no surprise to those who have worked with him for years.

Bernardin was a major force behind the crafting of a philosophy of the sacredness of life, grounding the church’s opposition to abortion in a fuller context that also precludes capital punishment and euthanasia. During the past week, using newfound personal knowledge, he has written letters to a national hospice group and to the Supreme Court, praising a natural approach to death on the one hand and deploring the notion of assisted suicide on the other.

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“I am at the end of my earthly life,” began his message to the justices. He wrote that “I know from my own experience that patients often face difficult and deeply personal decisions about their care.” He went on to note that deciding to decline further treatment is not the same as choosing death. Bernardin announced last month he would halt chemotherapy. “He hasn’t given up,” Gaynor said. “It simply was not working.”

The cardinal, long known as a mediator among American bishops, has also been troubled by harsh splits over the roles of women and homosexuals in church life and whether priests should be allowed to marry. During the time that he thought the cancer was in remission, he started an initiative he called Common Ground, to allow Catholics to disagree constructively.

The first conference was scheduled for March. After Bernardin learned of his cancer’s comeback, he worried that he might not make it.

On three weeks’ notice, 23 of the 25 prominent members of the Common Ground committee--including Cardinal Roger M. Mahony of Los Angeles--traveled to Chicago in October. Bernardin chaired a morning meeting, oversaw the passing of the gavel to Archbishop Oscar Lipscomb of Mobile, Ala., and then rested for a public address at a downtown hotel.

The project has drawn its share of criticism, and two women who came to see Bernardin speak that night were fearful that Common Ground would lead to dilution of church teachings. Still, as their frail, shrunken cardinal’s voice cracked, they squeezed their eyes shut to keep from weeping. The elder of the pair drew a handkerchief out of her purse.

“A dying person does not have time for the peripheral, the accidental,” Bernardin said. He told the audience, “It is wrong to waste the precious gift of the time given to us, as God’s chosen servants, on acrimony and division.” He resumed his place on the dais, clearly exhausted.

In recent weeks, even as he handed over day-to-day operations to an auxiliary bishop, Bernardin telephoned priests who he felt were alienated from him or from the church, whether over personnel decisions or official policies. He has reassured them that he cares about them and has given them a chance to say whatever they want to while they can.

“He’s really been an example to us of how to bring peace to your heart as you face death,” said Father Jeremiah Boland, who chairs the Presbyterial Council, representing Chicago’s 1,800 priests.

At the council’s September meeting, at a Dominican priory in suburban River Forest, Bernardin asked that there be one more prayer service for all the priests on the night before his funeral.

“I may have something written for you to read,” he told them.

For Boland, such talk was “kind of unsettling.” But a committee of 10 is making the arrangements.

The cardinal is confined to bed now in the 30-room brick and limestone mansion that is his official residence. Until a few days ago, he followed a simple schedule: rising before 6 a.m. as always to pray for an hour alone, then eat breakfast and rest.

At mid-morning, he would dress and climb a flight of stairs to his study, where he recently reread in a single sitting a book by his friend, the late Dutch-born priest and writer on spirituality, Henri Nouwen. “Our Greatest Gift,” it is called, “A Meditation on Dying and Caring.”

He would offer Mass in the chapel at 5 p.m. and, after dinner, return to his desk. After the nightly news, he would retire to bed.

He continued to venture the mile and a half to visit his 92-year-old mother (who has no short-term memory and no knowledge of her son’s health).

Since his cancer returned, he has traveled to Rome for a half-hour audience with Pope John Paul II and to Washington for the medal ceremony, a speech and a dinner.

He had been hoping for return trips--to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the pope’s ordination as a priest and to visit his own family in Italy, to mingle with American colleagues at this week’s meeting of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, on which he served as general secretary and as president.

He simply did not have the strength.

As Bernardin slips away from life, President Clinton has called to pay his respects; the pope has bestowed a blessing via speakerphone.

On Wednesday, Mahony came to visit his comrade’s bedside, while outside the residence, parishioners lit candles. A homeless man prayed at a statue of the Virgin Mary. And Margaret Brewer, a Methodist, was moved to attend Mass.

“I’m not a Catholic,” she said, “but he touched my life.”

The cardinal’s last public appearance came Oct. 29 as Loyola christened its Cardinal Bernardin Cancer Center. He stood inside, near the top of the building’s triangular glass atrium and prayed for the facility and its staff.

Then they did the same for him. God of our journeys, Lord of all life, please bless your servant, Cardinal Bernardin, with your strength and peace. He is our brother Joseph; he has taught us your ways of living and dying.

They intoned together. Amen.