James Michael Curley, on being released from prison, returned to his mayoral office at Boston City Hall, and spent a short time signing contracts. As Mayor Curley left, he boasted to reporters: ““Gentlemen, I’ve accomplished more in five minutes than has been accomplished here in the last five months.”

His replacement, the usually mild-mannered John B. Hynes, was standing by to hear these words. Infuriated, Hynes decided then and there that he would run against Curley for election as mayor. He did so, and his election in 1949 marks a decisive turning point in the fortunes of the City of Boston.

This is the view of Thomas O’Connor, the preeminent historian of Boston, who last week engaged in a public dialogue with me about his native city. Now University Historian at Boston College, this genial 82-year-old scholar brings decades of experience to writing about the events and personalities of this area.

Filled with stories and anecdotes about Boston, O’Connor delights in his work as observer of three centuries of local history. He attributes inspiration for his career to his Aunt Nellie, a Miss Marple-like woman who used to take him to visit downtown.  When he was only an eighth-grader, this great-aunt gave him for Christmas a copy of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Essays.

Back to the upstart mayor John Hynes. What he did, O’Connor says, is to break down the barriers that had long stood between the Irish and Yankee communities. Instead of carrying further the ongoing feud, this dethroner of Curley reached out to the bankers and other business leaders of the city and established alliances with them. Working together, Hynes and his new allies pointed the way toward a different kind of Boston.

Another important transition, Professor O’Connor holds, was that from Cardinal O’Connell to Cardinal Cushing in 1945. Cushing reached out in ecumenical friendship to Protestant and Jewish communities, something his predecessor as archbishop had never done. He brought to an end the era of Catholic triumphalism that had alienated other religious groups.

If people in Greater Boston now feel pride about their city, it is owing in large part to Hynes and Cushing, along with the later mayors John Collins and Kevin White. Tom O’Connor sees three events in the jubilee year 1976 as bringing the attention of people living in the suburbs to the transformation that had taken place in the city.

The visit of the Tall Ships, the visit of the Queen of England, and the concerts led by Arthur Fiedler on the banks of the Charles River alerted hundreds of thousands to the new scene. In O’Connor’s words: “The visitors looked around and said ‘look what they have done.’”

Asked why Boston is now regarded as open to diversity and tolerant of gay people in particular, O’Connor guesses that the very intensity of past prejudice has produced a backlash. Even in South Boston, where the historian grew up, people of color and of divergent lifestyles are currently accepted without question. This remains in sharp contrast to the past when minorities would fear to come to Castle Island and other places in Southie.

As to the changes in Boston’s Catholics, he attributes much importance to Jack Kennedy’s election as president. “Before that, you had to be a conformist.,” he says. “Kennedy’s rise allowed people to become critics as never before.” In this new atmosphere the Berrigan brothers could demonstrate against American militarism and religious sisters picket against racism.”  And, indeed, the young John Kerry could protest the Vietnam War.

For O’Connor, one insufficiently explored part of Boston’s history is the role of Irish women who worked in Yankee households. They became what he calls “culture carriers,” acute observers of how their employers lived. In time, when they founded their own families, they passed on some of the skills and values they had picked up from those economically better off.

Like many others, O’Connor is still reeling from what he calls the downfall of the Catholic Church in Boston. “It’s like being in the eye of a hurricane,” he says of the tumultuous events that have taken place here. “It is hard to get any perspective on it and I don’t know what the outcome will be,” he adds.

Drawing on the wisdom of a long lifetime, O’Connor expresses concern about some of the changes that have come upon his native city. “Boston may change so much that it becomes just another American city,” he warns. It will take prudent decisions if we are to build wisely upon the bold initiatives taken to improve the place.

In the preface to his book “Boston A to Z,” O’Connor writes: “It is this curious blend of the old and the new, the juxtaposition of the antique and the modern, that gives Boston its most distinctive flavor.” Preserving and enhancing this mix will challenge future leaders as well as members of local communities. In an era when change takes hold so quickly, keeping a sane balance will surely test the city’s mettle.

Richard Griffin

“A man who is not a radical when young lacks a heart; a man who in old age is not a conservative lacks a head.” So runs a classic statement often attributed to the 19th century British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli. If he said it, Disraeli was dead wrong about my friend John Cort.

By reason of his qualities of character and intellect, John Cort deserves to be better much known. In a 2003 memoir entitled Dreadful Conversions: The Making of a Catholic Socialist, he reveals himself to be a man dynamic in both youth and old age. Written as he neared 90, it recounts a colorful career full of dramatic events and memorable personalities.

However, his socialism, democratic as it is, does not give him a seller’s market in these days of capitalism rampant worldwide. It would not take many hands to count the number of American Catholics willing to be called socialists.

He became a Catholic just after finishing Harvard College in 1935, conversion number one. In the following year, he joined the Catholic Worker in New York City, under the leadership of Dorothy Day, who published a newspaper of the same name, founded a movement centered on justice and nonviolence, and provided food and  lodging to people down and out.

After a short stint at the Catholic Worker farm in Pennsylvania, John Cort took up residence in the House of Hospitality, two blocks west of the Bowery, and helped serve daily breakfast to those who joined the breadline. More significantly for his future career, he also helped found the Association of Catholic Trade Unions, an organization that served as base for his efforts to improve the lot of workers.

In 1950, after many more adventures than can be summarized here, Cort moved back to Boston. His work as business agent for the Boston Newspaper Guild has special significance for me. John entered into negotiations on behalf of the 300 members of his union who worked for the Boston Post. The management of the Post, a newspaper then in trouble, was represented by my father.

John remembers my father as a “hard negotiator,” not surprising in view of the reverses that the paper was suffering. The Post, at one time the dominant newspaper in New England, succumbed to economic pressures in 1956.

In 1962, Cort went to the Phillipines as a Peace Corps administrator; later he headed Massacusetts’ anti-poverty agency, and ran the Model Cities program in Lynn. During all this time, he continued his involvement in labor issues and the struggle for racial justice, both nationally and locally. Moving to Roxbury in the late 1960s, he and his wife acted to promote peace and justice there and elsewhere in a troubled city.

The father of 10 children, John Cort has good reason to value family life. As an experienced journalist, he often writes for Commonweal, most recently on the subject of funerals. He has plans for his own and hopes to be waked in his parish church in Nahant. But he is not yet ready for that event: there is too much work still to be done.

One of them concerns the reform of the Catholic Church. John constantly tries to get clergy and fellow laity to take leadership in that enterprise. He still takes inspiration from Pope John XXIII, whose willingness to enter upon drastic change in old age brought about radical change in the church.

Cort remains a Vatican II Catholic, holding fast to the promise of that great church council in the middle 1960s. Though the council’s innovations favoring shared power seem to have faded, he still believes that more democracy in the church is necessary. For that reason he supports Voice of the Faithful, the lay group working for reform but laboring under resistance from ecclesiastical authority.

In what he calls his “second conversion,” Cort became formally a socialist in 1975 when he was 62 years of age. It remains surprising that it took so long, because he claims that “any Catholic who takes the papal encyclicals [letters from the Pope on social issues] seriously should logically be a socialist.”

In 1977, Cort began a period of scholarship based at Weston Jesuit School of Theology in Cambridge. There he did research culminating in his 1988 book Christian Socialism: An Informal History.

For him, democratic socialism means a system of economy that “places first the satisfaction of common human needs−namely food, clothing, shelter, health, education, respect, and the good jobs at decent wages that make possible all these good and necessary things.”

As should be clear, John is a good ad for longevity. The vigor in his thinking and his robust physique make long life look good. He would freely admit the good fortune he has had – marrying well looms large among those gifts – being blessed with good health in later life, a fine education, and enough financial resources (despite his voluntary poverty as a young man.)

Back to Disraeli or whomever, I believe he would have had the good sense to jettison his mot if he had known John Cort.

Richard Griffin

A college classmate and friend of some 55 years’ standing emailed me from his native Mexico this summer with a reminder of an important event in our friendship. Carlos alerted me to the 35th anniversary, a few weeks earlier, of our having watched together Neil Armstrong’s walk on the moon.

That summer, now seeming long ago, I was visiting Mexico in order to take part in a professional workshop in Cuernavaca. Afterward, I had the pleasure of visiting Carlos and his wife Leni in Mexico City. They are the ones who first uttered a greeting that I had never heard before. They welcomed me with the Spanish proverb, “Mi casa es su casa” (my home is your home), and fulfilled it magnificently.

Not only did they ply me with refreshing tequilas and tasty tamales but they gave me the best bedroom in their house, introduced me to members of their extended family, and showed me the wonders of Mexico City. They set a new standard of hospitality, one that I still consider unsurpassed.

That July 20th, Carlos and Leni had taken me for lunch to the home of their relatives, some dozens of miles from the capital. We had intended to return to Mexico City to watch the landing on the moon but lunch was late and we would not have been able to reach home in time.

Fortunately, one of Carlos’s brothers lived in Texcoco, a town only a few miles short of our original goal. This town, though small, once played an important role in Mexican history; from it came the first indigenous allies of Cortes and his invading Spanish forces.

At the time of the Spanish conquest, Carlos tells me, the Texcocans were vassals of the Nahuatls and not happy about this status. For that reason they took advantage of Cortes’ arrival and allied themselves with him. This alliance enabled the conquistador, though he had an army of only a few dozen Spaniards, to overthrow the great Mexican empire.

When I visited, Texcoco-still a rural village- presented a memorable contrast with the thrilling spectacle that we watched on television that evening. We were observers of one of the greatest technological feats in the history of the world, while sitting in a town that showed few effects of modern science.

I felt myself privileged to be there with such marvelous friends as together we hailed Neil Armstrong’s triumphant message “The Eagle has landed.”  

“One small step for man, one giant step for mankind,” was the trenchant phrase the moonwalker used to characterize that epic event. The excitement of that evening and the contrast between a small town in rural Mexico and the new terrain of the moon has stayed with me ever since.

My reason for noting this anniversary, belatedly to be sure, is not simply to celebrate the historic triumph of that date but also to underscore the values in long friendship and those that come from contact with people of nations other than one’s own.

My friend Carlos remains an alter ego of mine despite too few face-to-face meetings through the years. That makes especially precious the opportunities for actually seeing one another. When he visited Cambridge last spring, for instance, we had the pleasure of recollecting some of the experiences we shared in college and since that time.

In later life, Carlos retains the courtly manners that helped forge our friendship originally. Like others among us, he even improved himself through marriage with a charming and talented woman. He and Leni are blessed in their five adult children and their 12 grandchildren.

Their family tradition is doubly rich in the combination of German descent and Mexican heritage. In my contacts with them I feel myself culturally enhanced as I draw upon their store of experiences different from my own. I also value their spiritual tradition, one that Carlos and I found compatible early on when we belonged to a prayer group together during our college days.

Although the moon walk stands out as one of the great shared experiences in the history of our friendship, conversation, letters, and now email, maintain ongoing links. But ours is a solid enough relationship that sometimes years can pass without contact and that neglect does not spoil it.

In a letter written to another friend, Carlos recently said of me: he “looks his age, he walks slowly and stoops a bit.”  Apparently to make me less decrepit, he added: “but his face is fresh and, mostly, he continues to be very active.”

In response, I summoned up my remarkable objectivity, and refuted his erroneous opinion. How could he possibly have made that judgment about my sleek self? Clearly, he suffered the disadvantage of never seeing me play Sunday softball and sometimes actually getting a base hit.

But old is good, in my book, and this enduring friend does me no disservice by words suggestive of oncoming decrepitude. Though in time the natural forces of decline will finally separate us, nothing will negate the blessings of this friendship.

Richard Griffin

Andrew Greeley is a Chicago-based Catholic priest whose talents are manifold. Sociologist, novelist, professor, columnist, he seems never at a loss for words. In fact, his critics often claim that Father Greeley has never had an unpublished thought.

That snide remark, however, can distract from Greeley’s solid accomplishments. More than a decade ago, long before others caught on, he warned about the scandal of sexual abuse perpetrated by members of the clergy. He foresaw the disastrous consequences of these crimes and of the failure of the Catholic bishops to take action.

Now in a new book entitled Priests:A Calling In Crisis,Greeley writes about the overall situation of American Catholic priests in the years after the shocking revelations. As his title indicates, the author believes that the priesthood continues in crisis. But, relying on survey findings, he reaches some surprising and unconventional results some of which that seem to clash with that view.

In the next-to-last chapter of this short book, he lists a dozen conclusions that summarize the book’s contents. Throughout, Greeley shows himself strongly critical of views that lack sound research behind them.

Contrary to much that appears in the media, Catholic priests are no more immature than other men. In fact, “priests on the average continue to be as mature and capable of intimacy as married laymen.” And, Greeley claims, they are likely to enjoy a higher level of satisfaction in their work and with their lives than do married Protestant clergy.

Further,Greeley brands it a mistake to blame sexual abuse on members of the clergy who are homosexual. Most gay clergy, he says, remain celibate, so calls for barring homosexual men from the seminary are ill-advised. Provocatively, Greeley sees anti-Catholic prejudice at work in blaming celibacy and homosexuality for the scandals.

However, Greeley admits the presence of what he calls a “homosexual subculture” in both seminaries and dioceses. The implications of this he does not spell out.

The author adamantly rejects the view of Catholic priests as largely misfits. On the contrary, they are among the happiest people in the world. They enjoy their work, feel glad they entered this career, and would choose to do it again.

Of those who leave the priesthood, only a relatively small minority do so because they desire to marry. A mere one out of six leaves for this reason, a figure that sharply conflicts with conventional assumptions. If this finding is correct, it would seem to undermine the idea that having a married clergy would remedy current problems.

To summarize Greeley’s basic view of his fellow clergy, “Priests stay in the priesthood and are happy in the ministry because they like being priests.” Most of them are what Greeley calls “religious altruists,” that is, men who find fulfillment serving others for spiritual reasons.

However, the author believes that priests under age 45 may be different from their elders. Some indications suggest they see the priesthood as a way of exercising authority from a secure position. If this surmise holds water, then these newer clergy will presumably have trouble with their colleagues and with laypeople.

Greeley finds that the clergy in general do not accept the Church’s teaching on sexual issues. Largely out o their respect for women and recognizing the freedom of laypeople, Catholic clerics commonly dissent from official orthodoxy in this area.

Most of the clergy support the ordination of men already married and the election of bishops. An astonishing one-half are in favor of ordaining women, despite strongly worded rejections of this position by Rome.

Somewhat surprisingly, given his other findings, Greeley holds that most priests are insensitive to laity and their needs. An indication of this attitude emerges in their widespread ignorance of how dissatisfied laypeople are with the quality of priestly ministry. The clerical culture acts to wall off clergy and laity from one another.

Finally, most priests believe that the clerical abuse scandal is not their problem but rather that of the bishops. They want those bishops who failed to act to resign or even to go to jail. But priests believe that the measures the American Church has taken in response will probably work.

The views expressed in this book strike me as provocative and worth wide discussion. However, I do find a basic conflict between Father Greeley’s recognition of crisis in the priesthood with his belief that priests feel happy and fulfilled.

Richard Griffin