N.Y. Cardinal O’Connor Dies of Cancer

Cardinal John J. O’Connor, regarded by many church leaders as the most prominent Roman Catholic prelate in the United States, died Wednesday after a battle with brain cancer. He was 80.

Joseph Zwilling, a spokesman for the Archdiocese of New York, said the cardinal died at 8:05 p.m. in his small bedroom at his residence in Manhattan. With him were family members and close friends from the clergy.

“The cardinal died very peacefully,” Zwilling said.

Earlier in the day, it was announced that O’Connor, whose health had been failing for months, took a “sudden and dramatic turn for the worse,” and prayers were requested for him.

As the health of the cardinal--the nation’s oldest active bishop--deteriorated, he “accepted the changes in his condition with great faith in God and in his mercy and gentle goodness,” Zwilling said.

“I considered Cardinal John O’Connor a special friend and a mentor,” said Cardinal Roger M. Mahony. “Over the years I consulted with him often, especially after becoming the archbishop of Los Angeles.

“The death . . . brings a close to an extraordinary chapter in the history of the Archdiocese of New York. A priest to the very core of his person, Cardinal O’Connor lived out his priesthood with an energy, a spiritual dynamism and commitment which inspired us all,” Mahony said.

“He was at once the friend and champion of the ordinary person, while at the same time unflinching in his public defense of God’s plan of salvation and the church before world leaders.”

President Clinton hailed the cardinal for his ministry. “For more than 50 years, he has reached out with uncommon fortitude to minister to the needs of America’s Catholics,” Clinton said. “The courage and firm faith he showed in his final illness inspired us all.”

“The church has lost a great warrior and the country has lost a great patriot who will long be remembered,” said the Rev. Billy Graham. “He was a bold and courageous man who stood firmly for what he believed. He was loyal and faithful to his friends and to his church.”

In February, O’Connor made a farewell journey to Rome to bid goodbye to Pope John Paul II.

The month before, more than 1,500 people applauded the cardinal--his face swollen from steroids, his body weakened by radiation treatments, but his spirit unbowed--during a gala dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel celebrating his 80th birthday. The evening ended on a highly emotional note when Rabbi Ronald B. Sobel of Temple Emanu-El, the prestigious and historic Manhattan congregation, delivered the closing prayer.

“Beloved eminence,” he began, repeating the phrase again and again for emphasis.

More than any other cardinal, O’Connor was the point man for the pope in the United States.

“I think he is a very good American echo,” said Michael J. Novak Jr., a scholar of religion and public policy at the American Enterprise Institute. “There is a saying in one of the psalms: Echo cries out for echo.”

As spiritual leader of 2.4 million Catholics in America’s richest and most influential archdiocese, which comprises Manhattan, the Bronx, Staten Island and seven counties in upstate New York, O’Connor took strong stands on a variety of issues.

“He has always been willing to tell it like it is when he knows people disagree with him,” said the Rev. Thomas J. Reese, a Jesuit scholar and the editor of America Magazine, a 90-year-old national Catholic weekly. “I think people respected him for that.

“He had a strong life position. It has not only been abortion, but concerns for the homeless, people on welfare, the street people, people suffering from AIDS. He has been very strongly in favor of labor unions. He has had a wide agenda he has been concerned with. It’s been easy to stereotype him--but wrong.

”. . . It is not easy to understand the American bishops don’t fall into the categories we use in American politics,” Reese continued. “The American bishops are with the Republicans by being against abortion and in favor of aid to Catholic schools.

“But they are with the liberal Democrats in their concern for the homeless and people on welfare. They are to the left of liberal Democrats on immigrants and opposition to the death penalty. The liberal and conservative categories are very confusing.”

Telling it like he believed it has meant taking highly public stands against the abortion-rights positions of high-profile members of the church, including former New York Gov. Mario M. Cuomo and Geraldine A. Ferraro, the Democratic Party’s first female vice presidential nominee.

“In the context of the United States, he has been an important figure in the 20th century church,” said Frances Kissling, president of Catholics for Free Choice, a Washington abortion rights group.

”. . . I think he is going to have a similar legacy to John Paul II. They are similar kinds of figures. I think he will have a legacy of fulfilling the social gospel in the public arena and being a hard-liner and conservative on church policy and teachings.”

O’Connor once sued New York City over gay rights regulations and stopped gay Catholics from meeting in a Manhattan church--actions that resulted in protesters chaining themselves to pews and hurling condoms during mass in St. Patrick’s Cathedral. At the same time, he emptied bedpans while working in a hospice bathing AIDS patients.

“New Yorkers in particular are profoundly grateful for his years of service to the city,” Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani said Wednesday night. “Cardinal O’Connor made enormous contributions to New York.”

The cardinal built strong bridges to New York’s Jewish community by meeting regularly with its leaders and appearing at synagogues, and he was instrumental in persuading the Vatican to formally establish diplomatic relations with Israel.

“He will be remembered as a friend of the Jewish community, as someone we could turn to who felt our pain, felt our needs, reached out to us,” said Seymour Reich, chairman of the International Jewish Committee for Interreligious Consultations.

As his death drew near, Congress in March awarded O’Connor the country’s highest civilian honor, the Congressional Gold Medal.

As testament to the cardinal’s power, 10 days before the presidential primary in New York, Texas Gov. George W. Bush sent O’Connor a letter expressing regret for appearing at Bob Jones University, whose policies many regard as anti-Catholic.

“Laura and I are saddened to learn that our American family has lost one of the premier religious leaders of our time,” Bush said Wednesday on learning of his death. “The cardinal was a man of profound spiritual depth and human compassion.”

Even as he weakened dramatically, O’Connor still managed at times to conduct Mass at St. Patrick’s, where he will be buried. By April, he was too ill to attend Easter services, and for the first time in 15 years he missed the St. Patrick’s Day parade up Fifth Avenue.

“The cardinal was never really in any pain throughout these months,” Zwilling said. “His suffering came in the form of not being able to do things. . . . He loved being a priest. He loved being with people.”

O’Connor was born Jan. 20, 1920, in Philadelphia, where he grew up as one of five children. His father earned a comfortable living restoring antique furniture. O’Connor would later say that he owed his vocation to the Christian Brothers who taught him at West Catholic High School in Philadelphia.

Ordained as a priest on Dec. 15, 1945, his first assignment was at St. James High School in Chester, Pa., where he taught English, civics, literature and religion and directed drama productions.

Later, he worked with the Pennsylvania Assn. for Retarded Children. He later told friends his great regret was that his entire priesthood was not spent working with the handicapped.

He continued work on advanced degrees, first getting a master’s in advanced ethics from Villanova University. He later earned a master’s in clinical psychology at the Catholic University of America and a doctorate in political science.

He was the rather obscure bishop of Scranton, Pa., when the pope in January 1984 named him to succeed New York’s Terence Cardinal Cooke, who had died of leukemia. He was elevated to cardinal 18 months later.

The pope’s choice had served in the Navy for 27 years, rising to the rank of rear admiral and chief of chaplains before retiring in 1979. O’Connor also was a member of the committee that crafted the American bishops’ pastoral letter on war and peace--which criticized America’s nuclear arms policy. He was the hawkish voice on the five-man committee.

O’Connor was familiar with New York’s archdiocese. He had acted as Cooke’s auxiliary in charge of military chaplains when the head of the New York archdiocese was also the spiritual leader of the Roman Catholics in the armed services.

Unlike the leaders of archdioceses in some other cities, O’Connor refused--despite the advice of business advisors--to close schools or shrink parishes because of financial concerns.

He wrote how he visited a small parish that had a school in the South Bronx. The day was bitterly cold and the cardinal was freezing when he was let into the rectory.

O’Connor sat down on a radiator, but it was colder than the rest of the room.

“Boy, it’s cold in here,” he told a priest. “Don’t you feel it?”

The priest replied that money for heat was being spent on the school.

“That’s church,” O’Connor said. “That’s really church. I am not going to close those schools.”

“A lot of the old-fashioned pastor-priest was in him,” said the Rev. Charles Neuhaus, editor-in-chief of the Institute for Religion and Public Life. “He is the only cardinal who visited every parish. I think the one word that describes him is a priest.

”. . . He had an almost intense, almost mystical sense of the priesthood. . . . He would fly back from a meeting in Rome with a courier to preside at a priest’s funeral,” Neuhaus said.

He told confidants he didn’t desire to be a prince of the church and wanted to be remembered as a worker’s son. Despite his public life, friends said O’Connor was essentially a private person.

“If by intimacy one means the pouring out of your heart and disclosure of your most anguished inner thoughts, he just doesn’t do that,” Neuhaus said.

“That gets taken care of in his life of prayer and contemplation. He has a very intense and in some ways mystical sense of communion with God and particularly with Christ and the blessed sacrament.”

As he fought his disease, the cardinal showed humor, insight and courage--and many New Yorkers responded with admiration.

O’Connor, the oldest archbishop in the United States, philosophized in the newspaper Catholic New York about his illness.

“God writes straight with crooked lines and only He knows what the next moment will bring,” the cardinal said. “Life is such a gift, and after . . . 80 years of living it, I have no sentiment as strong as gratitude.”

O’Connor is survived by three siblings, Dorothy Hamilton of St. Petersburg, Fla.; Mary Theresa Ward of Chadds Ford, Pa.; and a brother, Thomas J. O’Connor of Sea Isle City, N.J.

The cardinal’s funeral Mass is scheduled for 2 p.m. Monday at St. Patrick’s.