Catholic Leader Bernardin Dies of Cancer at 68

Cardinal Joseph L. Bernardin of Chicago, whose gentle manner, passion for conciliation and courage in the face of death touched the lives of ordinary Roman Catholics and world leaders alike, died Thursday. He was 68.

The senior active cardinal in the United States and one of the most prominent ecclesiastical figures in the nation, Bernardin died at his residence surrounded by family and friends, including Cardinal Roger M. Mahony of Los Angeles, who helped celebrate a private Mass for Bernardin in his final hours.

Among the callers offering prayers and final goodbyes were Pope John Paul II and President Clinton.

“He was at once both a prince of the church exercising a gifted role of leadership and a parish priest concerned with the hopes and anxieties of each parishioner,” Mahony said.

“History will record Cardinal Bernardin as our nation’s preeminent Catholic Church leader of the 20th century.”

Bernardin’s death was anticipated after he disclosed in August that his pancreatic cancer was terminal. The news of his death prompted thousands of ordinary Catholics to offer up prayers in neighborhood parishes and in the vaulted nave of Holy Name Cathedral in Chicago, where Bernardin presided as archbishop since 1982.

In a message to Chicago’s 2.3 million Catholics, Pope John Paul II said he learned of Bernardin’s death “with great sadness” and spoke of “the cardinal’s noble soul” and his “dignity and hope in the face of the mystery of suffering and death.”

In Washington, where the National Conference of Catholic Bishops was holding its annual fall meeting, 275 bishops prayed for the man who was instrumental in organizing the conference, serving as its first general secretary from 1968 to 1972 and its president from 1974 to 1977.

Indeed, Bernardin was a defining force in American Catholicism, helping shape Catholic thinking in an age wrought by controversies over issues ranging from abortion and changing sexual attitudes to the specter of nuclear war.

He wrote the U.S. bishops’ 1983 pastoral letter on peace that shook the Ronald Reagan administration when it decried massive nuclear retaliation as immoral and called for a moratorium on development and deployment of nuclear weapons.

Bernardin offered what he called “a consistent ethic of life” as a unifying rationale for Catholic opposition not only to war but to abortion, euthanasia and artificial birth control.

It was Bernardin who in a 1995 address at Hebrew University in Jerusalem examined Christian complicity in fostering hatred and persecution of Jews throughout the centuries and called on the church to engage in public repentance.

And it was Bernardin who this year, even as his cancer progressed, launched a new program--the Catholic Common Ground Project--to promote dialogue between bishops and rank and file Catholics on such vexing issues as the ordination of women and optional celibacy for priests.

It wasn’t that he necessarily agreed with changes in ordination or other items on a liberal agenda. To the end, he was loyal to the teachings of the church and to the pope. But he believed in talking, finding points of agreement and building on them.

“He had a wisdom and a vision and a grasp of how to get things done that you hardly ever find combined in one person,” said Bishop Thomas C. Kelly of Louisville.

Bernardin was born April 2, 1928, in Columbia, S.C., to an Italian immigrant couple. His father, Giuseppi, a stonecutter with a granite company, died when he was 6. His mother, Maria, supported Joseph and his younger sister Elaine by working as a seamstress and running a small grocery store where the boy helped out.

He attended a parochial elementary school, but had no choice but to go to public high school, prompting his later comment to Time magazine: “I learned early in life how to live with people whose beliefs differ from my own.”

Bernardin spent one year at St. Mary’s College in Kentucky, then attended St. Mary’s Seminary in Baltimore, where he received a bachelor’s degree in philosophy in 1958. Four years later, he received a master’s in education from Catholic University in Washington, D.C., and was immediately ordained a priest of the diocese of Charleston, S.C.

There he moved up steadily from assistant pastor to vice chancellor, chancellor, vicar general, diocesan consultor and in 1964 to executive assistant to the bishop. He essentially ran the archdiocese when the bishop’s post fell vacant.

Bernardin was consecrated a bishop in 1966--the youngest in the United States--and assigned as auxiliary to the archbishop of Atlanta.

Two years later he went to Washington, D.C., as the full-time general secretary--something like a chief of staff--of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops and its auxiliary U.S. Catholic Conference. He remained in Washington until 1972, when he was named archbishop of Cincinnati.

There he turned heads by selling the archbishop’s elegant mansion and moving to a spartan three-room apartment above a church. He drove himself to work and put in 15-hour days writing his sermons, bishops’ policy statements and a column for Catholic newspapers. Holidays were spent saying Mass in prisons or for migrant workers. He set up a relief fund for the poor.

In 1982, the self-effacing pastor was tapped to take over what was then the largest and richest Catholic archdiocese in the United States. (The Los Angeles archdiocese is now the largest.)

Just a year after taking the Chicago post, he spearheaded the bishops’ pastoral letter on nuclear war.

Kelly, who was general secretary of the bishops’ conference at the time, said Thursday there was no doubt that Bernardin had President Reagan’s attention, even as he sought to win a vote among his fellow bishops.

“The bishops were going into some uncharted waters there, especially when we were talking about nuclear defense weapons,” Kelly said. “He [Bernardin] had to learn all about that and then he had to adopt a position and then he had to command our trust, and he did that.”

“He had a remarkable gift of consensus-building, being able to bring people together, reconciling differences,” said Bishop Anthony M. Pilla of Pittsburgh, current president of the bishops conference. “It was with a certain calm and a certain peace. And we need to remember the times in which he was doing this. These had been very challenging times for us as bishops, for us as the church, and the church international.”

Despite his importance to the institutional church, Bernardin was seen by others as walking humbly before his God. His biographer, Eugene Kennedy, wrote that Bernardin never forgot the admonition of his mother even as he knelt before Pope John Paul II in 1983 to receive the red hat of a cardinal. “Walk straight,” she said, “and try not to look too pleased with yourself.”

Although a Roman Catholic Church cardinal is referred to as “his eminence,” archbishops and bishops alike spoke of Bernardin simply as Joseph.

“He was a cardinal, probably one of the most prominent ecclesiastical figures of our century in this country. And yet . . . there were no airs, no sense of superiority apparent,” Pilla said. “This was a wonderful, wonderful, warm human being.”

This was never more evident than after Bernardin was diagnosed with cancer, when he used his illness, then his impending death, as testimony to his faith and as a living homily to his flock.

When he visited cancer patients and encouraged them to persevere, they listened because he too was stricken by the disease.

“It’s a wonderful thing this happened. I consider it a great blessing,” he told Catholic News Service a year ago. “If I can be a source of help, a source of strength, a symbol of hope for the people who are facing these problems in their lives, then I’m happy to do it. I feel that the Lord would want me to do it.”

This September, he visited the cell of a convicted killer who asked to pray with him before being executed.

“In a sense, he and I are in the same boat,” Bernardin said before visiting Raymond Lee Stewart, who was executed Sept. 18 for killing six people. “He knows he’s going to die tonight, and I know that I am going to die in the near future.”

Just a week ago, he wrote U.S. Supreme Court justices urging them to rule against physician-assisted suicide. He opened his letter with a simple declarative sentence: “I am at the end of my earthly life.”

Then he wrote, “There is much that I have contemplated these last few months of my illness, but as one who is dying I have especially come to appreciate the gift of life.”

Bernardin told the justices, “Creating a new ‘right’ to assisted suicide will endanger society and send a false signal that a less than ‘perfect’ life is not worth living.”

Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston observed: “How characteristic of this generous-hearted man that at a time when most of us would choose privacy he chose to share even his experience of death in the hope that it might serve our nation in creating a better society.”

Facing his own death so publicly not only won praise from religious leaders, it brought him to the White House to be awarded the nation’s highest civilian honor, the Medal of Freedom.

Until he was stricken with cancer, Bernardin’s most trying personal ordeal was the controversy that briefly enveloped him in late 1993 when he was accused by Steven Cook, a former high school seminarian, of molesting him in the mid-1970s. Bernardin immediately faced the public and while he professed his total innocence, he said he had been “totally humiliated” by the suggestion he would do such a thing.

Three months later, Cook recanted and the episode had a typical Bernardin ending: At the cardinal’s suggestion, an intermediary arranged for the two to meet at a Philadelphia seminary. Cook then apologized and Bernardin offered forgiveness, a Bible and said Mass for his former accuser.

“Never in my 43 years as a priest have I witnessed a more profound reconciliation,” Bernardin said in a four-page account of the meeting.

His funeral is scheduled for noon Wednesday at Holy Name Cathedral in Chicago, with Mahony serving as principal celebrant for the Mass.

“While other leading Catholic prelates have served the church in exemplary fashion during this century, none has impacted the entire nation and beyond so deeply as has Cardinal Bernardin,” Mahony said Thursday.