In January 1994, I published a column on sexual abuse in the Catholic Church. The article appeared in the Cambridge Chronicle and started like this:

“When will it ever end? Yet another revelation of sexual abuse by Catholic clergy of children and adolescents has shocked a nation grown accustomed to such reports.”

Even with the resignation of Cardinal Law, the crisis I wrote about almost a decade ago has not yet come to an end.  However, the hope of something better has finally begun to shine through. A new archdiocesan administration, on a temporary basis, and then the prospective appointment of a new archbishop offer the promise of something better: action to repair some of the damage and to find new ways of putting  the needs of people first.

Rome, after a time of seeming eyeless like an ancient classical marble statue, has finally acted to sweep away the old leadership and bring on the new. Catholics and others can now hope that a new era can begin. But it is much too early to stop thinking about the Archdiocese’s betrayal of public trust.

In reflecting on the trauma of the past year, one can pretend that church corruption in Boston is without precedent. However,  for the Catholic Church in Boston, moral crisis is nothing new. Some of its history, not widely known, reveals seeds of corruption planted long ago.

The tone of ecclesiastical life was set here back in 1907 with the appointment of William O’Connell as the fifth bishop of Boston, the second to be an archbishop and, in 1911,  the first cardinal. He was to reign (the appropriate word) until 1944.

In 1912 the cardinal appointed his nephew, James O’Connell, to the office of chancellor of the archdiocese. Only 28 years old at the time, James O’Connell benefited from this nepotism to assume great power over church affairs. A fine account of this period can be found in the 1992 book Militant and Triumphant, written by James O’Toole,  now professor of history at Boston College.

The astonishing fact hidden behind the career of Monsignor James O’Connell is the fact that,  during most of the time of his chancellorship, he was secretly married. Under the name James Roe, he lived with his wife for a few days each week in New York City, where he became prosperous through investment of money apparently embezzled from the Archdiocese of Boston. Each week,  he would take the train to and from New York, changing back and forth from his clerical costume to mufti.  

Eventually word of this marriage reached Rome where Pope Benedict XV, in 1920, confronted Cardinal O’Connell with the fact of his nephew’s marriage. The cardinal denied the charge until the pope angrily produced a copy of the marriage license. Thereafter began a serious effort by some of his fellow American bishops to get the cardinal fired, an effort that lost steam when Pope Benedict XV died.

Thus ended a cover-up of dramatic proportions, one in which the cardinal was almost certainly complicit. In addition to this case of corruption, his biographer writes that William O’Connell’s opponents found in him a “ lack of true religious feeling.” One priest said of him: “an awful worldliness has crept into the sanctuary here” and he condemned the cardinal’s “scandalous parade of wealth, .  .  .  his arrogant manners, his strange and unecclesiastical method of living.”

Historian O’Toole also reports serious “irregularities” in O’Connell’s handling of finances when he was bishop of Portland, Maine. The evidence suggests that when he left Portland for Boston in 1907, he took with him some 25,000 dollars that belonged to the diocese he was leaving,  money that he was forced to return.

His predecessor, Archbishop Williams,  had lived in a room in his cathedral rectory in the South End. By contrast, O’Connell in 1926 took up residence in a Renaissance palace he had built at the corner of Commonwealth Avenue and Lake Street in Brighton. This was yet another step in establishing a princely style of life and a clericalism that was to take firm hold in Boston.

One cannot perhaps easily establish a direct link between the events described here and the current crisis. However, the history inherited by the clerics of the Boston Archdiocese suggests a disconnect  with the values of Jesus professed by the church at large. In fact, Boston has been long regarded by Catholic observers in other parts of the country as both unprogressive and highly clericalized  

My maternal grandmother, I remember, used to speak warmly of Archbishop Williams who  served the church in Boston from 1866 to 1907. His simplicity and unassuming personal style presumably represented to her what a bishop should be. But, as the Catholic community grew and developed in presence and power,  its leaders took on power without a corresponding sense of social responsibility and fidelity to Gospel values.

The mess we have now has deeper roots than is commonly realized.

Richard Griffin

In the summer of 1995, a heat wave of unprecedented  intensity struck the city of Chicago with devastating results. An estimated 739 people, most of them elderly, died during a single week in the month of July. This may seem a strange event to discuss in the cold of December, but the catastrophe can prove instructive about  how to live well in every season of our lives.

On day one of the heat wave the thermometer reached 106; during the following days it ranged between the 90s and the low hundreds. At night, the temperature did not fall below the 80s and people in apartment houses and other residences baked.

As thousands of people became sick, the city’s medical facilities were overloaded. Ambulance drivers had to travel for miles until they could find a hospital to admit their passengers. Twenty-three hospitals could not accept new patients because they were  filled with emergency cases.

On news programs around the country, Americans saw ghastly images of refrigerator trucks with the bodies of people who never reached the hospital.

The lessons learned from this dire event figure large in a new study by Eric Klinenberg, a sociologist at Northwestern University. His new book bears the title Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago. While watching an interview with the author, I felt confirmed in several  of my views about desirable, even indispensable, features of life in one’s later years.

Some of Klinenberg’s findings come as a surprise. For instance, men were twice as likely to die as women. Also Latinos died at a much lower rate than African Americans. As the author says in an interview found on the Internet, “Latinos, who represent about 25 percent of the city population and are disproportionately  poor and sick, accounted for only 2 percent of the heat-related deaths.”

Poverty alone does not provide a sufficient explanation.

Risk factors cited by the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention include the following conditions:  “living alone, not leaving home daily, lacking access to transportation, being sick or bedridden, not having social contacts nearby, and of course not having an air conditioner.”

Confirming these factors, Klinenberg confirms that hundreds of the victims died alone, “behind locked doors and sealed windows.” If they had friends, these victims had no effective contact with them. Neighbors and social service agencies never reached them either.

The author also mentions the culture of fear that marks the lives of some elders. Whether realistic or not, their anxiety about being assaulted prevents them from venturing outside or even opening their doors.

He also emphasizes the effect on a neighborhood of businesses, service agencies, and other people moving away. That leaves behind those with no other options and they remain vulnerable to isolation. Single room occupancy buildings and what Klinenberg calls “last ditch housing” also expose people to terrible dangers.

The author refuses to assign blame to any one individual or organization but finds a large number of agencies sharing responsibility for the tragedy. The city certainly failed to recognize the scope of the tragedy as it began and developed. Much more than the municipal government realized, greater resources were needed and so was coordination of services.

My own reflections on this sad debacle center on the need for community. Even if it did not expose me to danger, I would still judge isolation from other people terribly sad. Too many of us, young and old, cherish  false myths of independence. To me, it’s simply not desirable to go it alone, especially as I grow older.

Even what seems a highly desirable ideal – – aging in place – – turns out to have limitations. For some people, living alone in their own house can become both emotionally impoverishing and physically dangerous. Almost all of us need the support brought by interchanges with other people.

Yes, some people end up alone in situations not of their own choosing. But, as a society, we must try to become more imaginative about ways of reducing segregation and bringing people together. Both our bodies and our souls require this stimulus and a disaster like the Chicago heat wave of 1995 can help us recognize this need.

We men are in special need. Lacking the domestic skills required for a gracious lifestyle, as so many of us do, and often being averse to developing close relationships with other people, we can find ourselves dangerously isolated in old age. Perhaps we can get by on our own at age 30, but at age 85 can any of us? And, is it even desirable?

The Chicago experience also suggests that the quality of our neighborhood has great importance also. Granted the difficulties of finding places to live that are both supportive and stimulating, we still have reason to be wary of areas in decline. If they lose residents and businesses also leave, that can create vulnerability for us.

A heat wave can thus stir reflection on what makes for a good life as well as a reasonably safe one.

Richard Griffin

Looking back at his life, Hob’s wife Olivia speaks of his “hard edges which softened with his age; he had a beautiful soul.”

These words come from a new video, entitled “Hob’s Odyssey,” that family members and friends have been viewing recently. It has been a year since Hob’s death last Thanksgiving Day at age 78. As we celebrate the same holiday again this week, I am giving thanks for the life of this friend who provided much inspiration to me as he did to many others.

What strikes me most about his life as shown in the video is the transformation of character he shows from early adulthood to his middle and later years. Seeing him as a jaunty and debonair young man in New York City, I found it hard to connect that person with the friend I came to know decades later.

The changes in him happened in large part because of the spiritual quest on which he entered as he grew into middle age. It was a searching shared by his wife Olivia as the two traveled widely together, on both external and interior journeys.

Olivia’s sense of adventure supported Hob as he experimented with truth. “How can you not rejoice to see your partner jumping into the new?” she asks. The sober answer is, of course, “Easy.” Many partners would be made unhappy seeing the person closest to them constantly looking for change.

But Hob’s partner saw the “transformative influences” of  the spiritual practices that he adopted. She later observed that as his spirituality took hold, “the depressions vanished and the volatilities.”

A crucial event occurred in 1982 when they visited India for the first time. While there, Hob became crippled by dysentery making it impossible for him to walk. In Bombay they met a charismatic woman healer named Sree Chakravarti who, in front of 200 onlookers, touched Hob and commanded him to stand up and walk. “It just blew all his circuits,” says Olivia of this event. “I saw him the victim of a miracle.”

In India the couple became friends with Father Bede Griffiths, an English Benedictine who had established an ashram there and lived as both a Catholic priest and a Hindu holy man. This friendship was to take hold and last the rest of Father Bede’s life while exercising a creative influence on Hob’s search.

Other spiritual leaders helped Hob find his way toward enlightenment. Among them, the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Han was perhaps the most significant. At his hands, Hob was ordained a senior teacher in the Buddhist tradition, an office he felt honored to hold.

Others from whom Hob drew inspiration were the Dalai Lama, Jean Vanier, and Father Henri Nouwen. Vanier, a Canadian who founded L’Arche, a network of communities uniting people with developmental disabilities and their helpers, opened new insights for Hob. For a time he worked as a volunteer in a L’Arche house in Erie, Pennsylvania, an experience which contributed to his spiritual growth.

Father Nouwen, the Dutch priest whose spiritual writings have moved many, helped Hob to find value in suffering. Within fragility of heart lies great strength, Nouwen taught, a reality that Hob was to show forth in the last years of his life.

Those years were the time when Hob had Alzeimer’s disease. This he managed to accept with remarkable grace, though it would be a mistake to underestimate the difficulties. “What made it doable, and even light at times, is we’ve chosen to do it together,” Olivia said of the ordeal. “That’s not to gloss over the losses,” she added. “The depth of his pain and rejection surprised me.”

As the video confirms, the support that Olivia gave her husband then was crucial. I never tire of repeating what Hob once told me when I asked him a question that he had forgotten how to answer. Turning to Olivia, he told me: “She is my memory,” beautiful words I continue to treasure.

No wonder Olivia says “Hob is one of the most intriguing persons I have ever known.” She also speaks of what they had together –  – “intertwined Karmas off the charts.”

Seeing a person’s life whole, as “Hob’s Odyssey” enables one to do, stirs thoughts too deep for expression. The adventure, the beauty, the surprises, the pathos, the twists and turns, –  –  all contribute to a richness that goes beyond easy expression. The 78 years have a power in them that lasts beyond the confines of mortality.

The video concludes with a song by Leonard Cohen that celebrates what Hob and Olivia held together. “Dance me to the panic till I’m safely gathered in,” says a verse. “Dance me to the end of love,” goes the refrain.

Hob has been safely gathered in. This love, however, does not end. In touching  family members and friends, this love remains a present reality.

Richard Griffin

“When I don’t feel like doing housework and I don’t feel like reading or writing, I love to make music.”  This was the answer given me last week by Violet Myvaagnes to my question about why she plays the recorder. Ms. Myvaagnes,  who lives in Mt. Vernon House in  Winchester  was obviously enjoying that activity on the evening when we met.

At age 91, she enjoys coming together with others to play regularly. She took up the recorder when her boys were little and now, many decades later, she continues to find pleasure playing this instrument.

She is in good company as a member of the Boston Recorder Society that meets monthly at the New School of Music in Cambridge to make music together. Invited by Laura Conrad, Adminstrator of the Society and a regular reader of this column, I visited the group last week and enjoyed talking with several of the players among the 15 or so gathered for music and fellowship.

Incidentally, when I identified the title of this column, Violet Myvaagnes saw its point and related to it immediately: “Growing Older, .  .  .  OK, we’re all doing it!” said this elder, a woman full of vitality.

Judy Demarrais, a resident of Needham, boasts, “I’ve been a member forever.”  Forever turns out to be since 1972 when she was 40. “My husband said to me I was too old to learn music,” but she went ahead anyway. Though he has a very fine ear, she says that  he cheerfully puts up with her playing despite its deficiencies.

Judy is one of several members who play instruments other than the recorder. “I read early music to keep my brain active,” she says.  She performs with the group on the dulcian, az reed instrument like the early bassoon. “I think this group is the sort of thing that can really contribute to community spirit.” “This is so participatory,” she adds.

Duncan MacDonald, a retired space engineer who now lives on Beacon Hill, plays the flute. He also belongs to a  nation-wide  association of flutists whose members once played the national anthem at an Arizona Diamondbacks baseball game. “Seven hundred flutists lined the field from first base to third base in the outfield, with the conductor at second base,” he recalled. When I called this unique performance much preferable to hearing some pop singer murder the national anthem, Duncan readily agreed.

Talking with him was Marleigh Ryan, who took up the recorder on the last day of 1998. That was the day on which she retired from her position as a professor of Japanese literature in New York.  A Cambridge resident, she has enough enthusiasm to have moved her to join another group of recorder players, this one in Framingham.

Tobi Hoffman, a middle-aged computer programmer,  finds playing all-absorbing.  “Even if I come to a session with a headache, while I’m playing, I will not notice that headache.”  I ask how she likes playing with people older than herself. “Music is community,” she replies; “It’s part of something bigger than yourself.”

Ann Murphy of Brookline has been playing for more than twenty years. Before her retirement, she was a social worker at Children’s Hospital and a part-time teacher at Salem State College. When she was younger, she wanted to play an instrument,  but regrets that she never found the time. About the recorder, she says, “You can do something with it a little sooner.”  The sessions of the Society she sees as “a nice opportunity to get together with other players.”

This sampling of amateur musicians, younger and older, indicates the potential the playing of music has to enliven personal life. For older people in particular, this activity seems to have a rejuvenating effect, especially because it throws them into meaningful contact with those younger than they.

Though the players at this session took their music seriously, the atmosphere was relaxed and no one needed to feel on the spot. In this non-ageist, not competitive environment, people were free to do their best without anxiety about the outcome. The relish they felt in the music itself was obviously a powerful force making them feel good about themselves.

The members of the Boston Recorder Society consider the recorder a good instrument to start in later life. It can give some satisfaction much faster than a more complicated instrument such as the violin. And the learning experience differs sharply from the music lessons of children, in the bad old days, when they were subjected to tiresome drills.

I recall my own piano lessons when my teachers, though not unkind, did not provide me with much gratification. They made me respect the instrument but not love it. Only the prospect of a Red Sox or Bees game, promised as a reward to follow the lessons, gave me the motivation to persevere. The love that the Recorder Society members feel for their instruments makes for a joyful contrast.

Richard Griffin