Render Unto Rome_ The Secret Life of Money in the Catholic Church - Jason Berry [41]
If you are not a priest, if you have never been a priest, you cannot know what I am talking about. I barely know myself. I know I am disappointed. I thought priests followed Jesus and made mistakes. I did not know it was a mistake to think all priests follow Jesus. There are indeed some who follow power. And they are a disappointment.
Does that sound harsh? I pause in my heart to laugh about it and to cry. Priests who will not share, cannot share love. Pastors and autocrats who know their word is law. Institutions long decayed that shut people out, out of Eucharist, out of authority, out of governance, out of a shared wisdom. They do not listen, except to denial. They don’t have to.
I wonder if they are afraid or hurt. But I no longer excuse it.
We are not crying about some “vocation crisis.” We are not whining about the work and the task. We are not complaining about celibacy and sexual identity and the roles men and women play in the church. These things just add to the already burdensome experience of being disappointed. We just want to survive.4
Cardinal Law wrote Bowers, demanding a letter to explain why he wrote the article. Bowers complied; Law then summoned him. Bowers’s genealogy included three cousins who had been nuns and a pair of granduncles who were priests. He unburdened himself, telling Law how his rectory experiences had fallen gallingly short of his seminary expectations—the drunken priest nearly attacked him in one of his stupors. He spoke about the chasm he felt from certain older clerics who were robed in pomposity. Law listened. When Bowers finished, Law said, “I ordained you once and I’d do it again.” That was it: issue resolved. Law had registered his message: No more troublesome articles, Father.
Bowers left the chancery on a wave of ambivalence.
Fluent in Spanish, Law was a strong advocate for dark immigrants who came to Boston. The son of a U.S. Air Force officer, he was born in Mexico and moved often with his parents. Elected president of his black-majority high school class in the Virgin Islands, Bernie Law went to Harvard, and on graduation entered the seminary. As a young priest in Mississippi during the 1960s, he championed the civil rights struggle and became a monsignor at the Jackson diocese, striding on the good side of history. After working in Washington, D.C., for the bishops’ conference, he became a bishop and spent several years at the head of a small diocese in Missouri. In 1984 Pope John Paul II named him archbishop of Boston, an area of 144 towns and cities, with nearly 2 million Catholics. Law announced that the archdiocese would cover the maternity costs and handle adoption for any unwanted pregnancy. After he became a cardinal in 1985, far fewer people called him Bernie. He liked “Your Eminence.”
His absolutism on abortion and on gay relationships did not endear Law to liberals. But he forged ties with Jewish leaders in an ecumenical spirit, and was a visible advocate for poor people, regardless of their citizenship. Catholic conservatives bridled when he gave Communion to pro-choice senators Ted Kennedy and John Kerry. He backed Congressman Joe Kennedy’s annulment request, to remain a Catholic in good standing after his second marriage. Kennedy’s annulment took on a ten-year odyssey through the Vatican courts, before it was stunningly revoked, after a well-documented appeal by his former wife, Sheila Rauch Kennedy. She dissected the process in a 1997 memoir, Shattered Faith. After her position was vindicated, she called the process “very dishonest … The way it is used in American tribunals, it can be anything—a bad hair day, your goldfish died, you weren’t playing with a full deck when you married twenty years ago. And people defending [the marriage], usually women, have been belittled.”5
In sermons Law tended to elongate his vowels, a high sign of gravitas. Socially, he had silken charm. But the side of Law that had to have things his way