Cardinal O’Malley?

In the next few months, if not weeks, the Vatican will announce that Pope John Paul II has appointed new cardinals.  At least, this is my prediction of an event that has become routine every few years.  It does not take a soothsayer to foresee this happening soon.

When it does happen, Sean O’Malley, the new archbishop of Boston, will almost surely be one of those chosen.  Because he holds this position in the third or fourth largest archdiocese in the United States with more than two million Catholics, he will be included among those favored by the pope for this honor. The last four of his predecessors –  Archbishops O’Connell, Cushing, Medeiros, and Law – were all selected for the red hat and installed with much hoopla surrounding the event.

I would like to suggest that Archbishop O’Malley turn down the appointment as cardinal.

To most right-thinking people this suggestion will undoubtedly sound outrageous. They will quickly point to the advantages of Boston’s archbishop accepting the position and they may even judge it an affront to the pope if he were to refuse it.

Among the advantages, the most important is the role of cardinal as papal elector. Since the year 1059, cardinals have had the responsibility of voting for the next pope when the seat has fallen vacant. After they have determined their choice by at least a two- thirds majority, then the ballots are burned, white smoke seeps out into the air, and people assembled in St. Peter’s square see that someone has been elected.

Cardinals also have special access to the pope and can advise him on issues of importance to the church. They have leverage with other church leaders also, bringing more prestige to bear than do other bishops.

However, the cardinalate remains largely honorary and does not confer on the holder of this office any spiritual advantages.  As a matter of fact, it carries with it, in my opinion, certain disadvantages from the vantage point of spirituality and this is my chief reason for suggesting that Sean O’Malley content himself with being archbishop.

Not only does the Bible offer no basis for the office of cardinal, but the words of Jesus in the Gospels conflict with the pomp and circumstance that so often attend the role. In many ways, he emphasized to his disciples the importance of simplicity and personal humility, along with the avoidance of external show.

In St. Matthew’s Gospel, for instance, Jesus contrasts the style the apostles are to follow by contrast with that of secular rulers. “You know,” he says, “that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. It will not be so among you; but whoever wishes to be great among you must be your servant.”

In other texts Jesus disapproves of his followers seeking the place of honor at banquets and he tells them to avoid external show of piety in favor of the interior spirit of religion. The lifestyle of American cardinals, who dress in brilliant red and are deferred to at every step, seems hardly compatible with the words of Jesus. Also the disproportionate influence they have among the American bishops as a group is reported to damage the collegial spirit of those bishops.

Archbishop O’Malley has already announced his intention to live in the rectory of his cathedral rather than in the grandiose building where his four predecessors lived. Though he has tried to downplay the importance of this decision, it has spoken to people interested in seeing Boston’s new spiritual leader show forth Gospel values of simplicity and humility.

The decision to turn down the cardinalate would indicate even more clearly the archbishop’s commitment to these same values. It would be a way to tell people concerned about the ailing church of Boston and the Catholic Church across the country that he will be different from other leaders.

It would be a way of disassociating himself from conventional power and influence. In accordance with the tradition of his patron, St. Francis of Assisi, this gesture would ally the archbishop with that saint’s radical renouncing of worldly advantage.

Sober heads will tell you this will never happen. However, for spiritual reasons I suggest that renunciation of the cardinalate could strike a blow for freedom and signal new beginnings for Catholics in Boston and throughout the country.

Richard Griffin

Dead of Heat in Paris

Some estimates of those dead in France’s August heat wave have risen to ten thousand. Most of these victims of soaring temperatures were apparently old people who were left to their own devices in coping with the suffocating environment. Living alone turned out to be hazardous this summer.

Having spent a week in Paris earlier this summer, I can easily envisage the setting in which many French elders live. Along narrow streets, in old stone buildings that rise several stories, many without elevators, old people often inhabit small apartments. Often these pensioners stay to themselves and lack close attachments to other people in their building.

On occasion, I have talked with such people and have admired the way they find quiet satisfaction in daily life in a huge bustling city to which they feel attached. But I never envisioned disasters coming from the summer temperatures as happened this month.

William Pfaff, a nationally syndicated columnist, has suggested that dying like this was a good way to go. In his view, being overcome by extreme heat produces a death that is comparatively easy. He ends his op-ed with this affirmation: “I say we should be grateful to pneumonia, broken hips, and heat waves that can take us gracefully to where we all must go.”

What he leaves out of account, however, is that most of the people living in Paris and other cities died alone. They had no family members, friends, or neighbors to comfort them as they departed this life. That seems to me among the least desirable ways to die, isolated and cut off from the consoling touch of fellow human beings.

France’s government officials are clearly feeling pangs of guilt. Behind the careful rhetoric, statements from the president and others suggest a belated realization of failure to accept responsibility for the safety of older citizens and others. Few heads have rolled: the equivalent of their Surgeon General has resigned but no one else thus far.

Why did not French officials learn from what happened in Chicago during the summer of 1995.  There an estimated 739 people, most of them elderly, died in a single week in July. They succumbed to heat that registered 106 degrees the first day and between the 90s and low hundreds on succeeding days. Twenty-three hospitals could not accept new patients; ambulance drivers had to travel for miles to find a hospital to admit their passengers.

Studies of the Chicago experience revealed lessons that were available to authorities in big cities everywhere. Parisian officials could have been prepared for the onslaught had they heeded what was learned in Chicago. A book by Eric Klinenberg, Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago, in particular could have been of great value to French government figures.

The great French heat wave occurred mainly in August, the worst time it could have happened. This month is the time when a great many city dwellers leave town for their annual summer vacation. They clear out en masse leaving many shops and restaurants closed, and reducing the work force in hospitals and other places where help is usually available.

My instinct has been to praise the French for their culture’s insistence on taking time off. But now I have come to realize the drawbacks of having so many people away at the same time. Having only a skeleton force to help at times of emergency can clearly prove harmful to the population.

In addition to reduced emergency workers, there is also the absence of family members, friends, and neighbors. Tante Suzanne finds herself cut off from nieces and nephews when she may need them most. Basking in the Côte d’Azur may be good for the younger people’s mental health, but how about the needs of family members left back home in the stifling heat?

If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a similar human community to support an older person. I would extend the net wider and add that adults of every age need the resources of other people to sustain them in good physical health and mental condition. No doubt, however, we older people have special needs that come with disability and sometimes flagging spirits.

I see the French debacle as a failure, not only of government, but of the whole community. Yes, the government failed in its responsibilities but too many ordinary people did not respond to the needs of their elders. As family members, neighbors, and citizens at large, ces messieurs (et ces dames) failed to see what they could do to help save those who lived near them.

Segregation of any sort has its price. Segregation by age can sometimes deprive older people of life itself, as the French experience shows. We may sometimes wish to be largely left alone but the time comes when being left alone can prove fatal.

One can hope that nothing like this disaster occurs again.  The French have an opportunity to develop a renewed appreciation of how much we, older and younger, need one another.

Richard Griffin

Keating’s Insights

So-called “reality television” keeps coming up with new slices of life.  Among the newest, a Fox Network series called “Nip/Tuck” graphically offers viewers of human flesh being sliced, along with plenty of blood.

Whether television shows like this one actually depict reality is another question. About “Nip/Tuck” the American Society of Plastic Surgeons says: “The Society wants to reassure the public that Nip/Tuck does not in any way represent a realistic plastic surgery practice.”

The series, however, does seem to have some reality about it. It may not show plastic surgeons or their work as they really are but it does show people thinking badly enough about themselves to undergo pain and suffering to change their body image.

The producer, Ryan Murphy, told a New York Times interviewer that, when he first started thinking about the program, he intended it to be “a brutal hour look at the reasons people hate themselves.” And, in the first program, shown in July, a doctor asks his patient, “Tell me what you don’t like about yourself.”

Self-dislike, self-hatred seem to be epidemic in American society.  Many of us feel badly about ourselves because we do not measure up to our culture’s ideals of beauty and success.

To combat this tendency, therapies such as the self-esteem movement attempt to turn us around toward the bright side of ourselves. Through mantras of positive thinking, these therapies try to make us feel good rather than to go deeper.

Many seekers among us, however, find in the great spiritual tradition a greater depth and more solid personal support. Monastic spirituality, for example, offers insights into reality that can inspire us to think altogether better of ourselves.

Such insight has come from Thomas Keating, the former abbot of St. Joseph’s Abbey in Spencer, Massachusetts. Father Keating, widely known for his parenting of the approach to contemplation called “Centering Prayer,” speaks as one who has moved deeply into the life of the spirit.

One of his statements about love is especially worth pondering. “If we have not experienced ourselves as unconditional love,” he says, “then we have more work to do, because that is who we really are.”

Here is a definition of reality that differs sharply with that offered by “reality” shows. Father Keating’s dynamic words, allowed to take root in heart and soul, could transform a person’s life and change his or her world.

In contemplating these words, you will discover layers of meaning. Notice, for instance, how Father Keating does not speak of unconditional love as the source of our being, a sentiment often found in spiritual writing. Rather, he sees each person as himself or herself embodying that love.

And the word “unconditional” means that no matter what, you are loved. It is not a love you must earn but rather it comes to you freely. It makes up part of you because you are you. Ultimately, it reveals the nature of the God who is love.

The word “experience” also signals something important. The realization of oneself as unconditional love does not arise from the thinking we do inside our head. Rather it flows from our daily life, the people we encounter, the work we do, the leisure we enjoy, all the activities that we understand as human experience.

The phrase – “then we have more work to do” – suggests the spiritual exercises that form part of the interior life. Prayer, reflection, silence are the work of the seeker after insight into the self as love.

The way Father Keating phrases the matter reveals a certain irony. He surely realizes that hardly any of us have experienced ourselves as unconditional love. Or, if we have at some time, then this insight has not stayed with us for very long. At best, this view of ourselves comes and goes.

The “more work to do” of which the abbot speaks amounts to an agenda for us as we try to live more fully out of the realization that we are loved. It is the work of a lifetime because all of us need to keep this vision of ourselves fresh.

And Father Keating affirms that this approach to human life would not be just play acting. “Because that is who we really are” opens up his view of us as, not merely loved or loveable, but unconditional love in itself.

Richard Griffin

Nelson Mandela

To me, and presumably to the 25,000 other people assembled for the occasion, it gave exuberant joy to see personally one of the greatest moral heroes of the 20th century. To behold him standing on the stage in Harvard Yard bowing and smiling in response to our cheers brought tears to my eyes.

Nelson Mandela, president of South Africa, came to be honored but he honored us all with his presence. As Harvard President Neil Rudenstine said to him, “You are the conscience of a nation, the soul of a people.”

Others helped bring out the dimensions of the man. “You have led the entire world on a walk toward truth,” said Prof. Jeffrey Sachs in tribute. And another faculty member, Henry Louis Gates, spoke to Mandela of “your nobility, your presence, your straight back; your unbowed head… as regal as any king.”

Mandela is now 80 years of age, so those words of Gates describe an elder statesman as yet vigorous and dynamic. In fact, if you examine photos of the younger Mandela, you will see a man whose looks, in the way of some older people, have much improved with age. He has come into the full maturity of years with distinction, both physical and spiritual.

Nelson Mandela carries those years lightly. In fact, he joked about his age by telling about a middle¬aged woman who wanted to see him 10 years ago. After his aides admitted her to his presence he asked what she wanted. She replied, “I came to see how a man of 70 looks like.”

“Now I am 80,” Mandela explained. “I am encouraged to see so many people who have turned out. I am not sure if you came here to see how a man of 80 looks like.”

Nelson Mandela has lived to an old age which has brought fulfillment both for himself and his people which he could only have dreamed about. For me he is a modern-day Simeon, that New Testament elder who lived into his 80s, long enough to see the Lord's promises fulfilled.

Mandela came to Harvard accompanied by his wife Grace Marchel, herself an elder citizen, who married him this past summer. She, too, has a charismatic personality which she showed forth waving and smiling in response to enthusias¬tic applause. This column could have been about Mandela and Marchel finding new love in old age.

To me, and presumably to the 25,000 other people assembled for the occasion, it gave exuberant joy to see personally one of the greatest moral heroes of the 20th century. To behold him standing on the stage in Harvard Yard bowing and smiling in response to our cheers brought tears to my eyes.

Nelson Mandela, president of South Africa, came to be honored but he honored us all with his presence. As Harvard President Neil Rudenstine said to him, “You are the conscience of a nation, the soul of a people.”

Others helped bring out the dimensions of the man. “You have led the entire world on a walk toward truth,” said Prof. Jeffrey Sachs in tribute. And another faculty member, Henry Louis Gates, spoke to Mandela of “your nobility, your presence, your straight back; your unbowed head… as regal as any king.”

Mandela is now 80 years of age, so those words of Gates describe an elder statesman as yet vigorous and dynamic. In fact, if you examine photos of the younger Mandela, you will see a man whose looks, in the way of some older people, have much improved with age. He has come into the full maturity of years with distinction, both physical and spiritual.

Nelson Mandela carries those years lightly. In fact, he joked about his age by telling about a middle¬aged woman who wanted to see him 10 years ago. After his aides admitted her to his presence he asked what she wanted. She replied, “I came to see how a man of 70 looks like.”

“Now I am 80,” Mandela explained. “I am encouraged to see so many people who have turned out. I am not sure if you came here to see how a man of 80 looks like.”

Nelson Mandela has lived to an old age which has brought fulfillment both for himself and his people which he could only have dreamed about. For me he is a modern-day Simeon, that New Testament elder, who lived into his 80’s, long enough to see the Lord’s promises fulfilled.

Among current world leaders Nelson Mandela is one of the few who deserves the title given to Ghandi – Mahatma, or “Great-Souled One.” In his lifetime he has demonstrated his great soul through many actions but none so meaningful as those which followed his release from prison in 1990.

The great day of liberation came after he had spent 27 years in confinement on trumped-up charges of treason leveled against him by the apartheid government. Those years he spent on Robben Island, which in “Long Walk to Freedom” he calls “the university.” He and his fellow political prisoners called it that “because of what we learned from each other.”

After walking free at last, Mandela led the nation through a series of epoch-making transformations. Throughout, he insisted on not taking any revenge of those who had treated him and his followers so badly for so long. To this day he has refused to direct reprisals toward his oppressors. That takes a kind of spiritual power which few other leaders have ever proven capable of.

Almost anyone else, unjustly deprived of almost three decades of freedom, along with forced labor and other punishments imposed on him, would find it impossible to forgive his abusers. But if Mandela had given into the impulse for revenge, he would have condemned his country to continued strife, perhaps civil war.

As he approaches the end of his term of office, the president of South Africa continues to show himself a man for others. He is determined to do all that he can to improve living conditions for the people of his coun¬try. And his concern includes the other countries of the world.

As he said in his acceptance speech at Harvard, “The greatest single challenge facing our globalized world is to combat and eradicate its disparities… We constantly need to remind ourselves that freedoms which democracy brings will remain empty shells if they are not accompanied by real and tangible improve¬ments in the material lives of the millions of ordinary citizens of those countries “

Richard Griffin

Renewing a License

Three weeks before my most recent birthday, the Registry of Motor Vehicles sent me a new driver’s license. This card enables me to operate an automobile legally for the next five years. It comes as reassuring to know myself entitled to drive without restriction except for needing to use “corrective lenses.”

For the first time since 1946, I did not need to wait in line at a registry office. Instead, I applied online, filling out a short questionnaire and paying the 40-dollar fee by credit card. In response to this electronic sleight-of-hand, the new license arrived in the mail a few days later. So much for the grief associated with the registry during most of my past life.

The birthday I just celebrated was my 75th so I am now covered until I reach age 80. You can expect to see me behind the wheel until at least 2008, tooling around town and on highways, provided my longevity continues in force.

For convenience, it is now a great system. This time around, they did not require me to leave my chair. And I do not have to think about it for the next half decade.

This situation would strike me as altogether ideal were it not for Russell Weller. He is the 86-year-old resident of Santa Monica who, at the time I was applying for my new license, plowed into a crowd at a farmer’s market, killing ten and injuring another 50 or so.

Weller held a valid license but had been involved in various minor automotive mishaps such as driving into the wall of his garage. About the fatal accident, he said, in a statement read by his minister: “There are no words to express the feelings my family and I have for those who suffered loss and pain as a result of Wednesday's devastating accident. I am so very distraught, and my heart is broken over the extent of the tragedy.”

According to the local police, Weller thinks he must have  stepped on the gas instead of the brake.  A news photo showed him using a cane when he walked out of the police station with his grandson so he apparently has a disability.

Reading about the Santa Monica tragedy has altered my consciousness. Now, when I see a newspaper story about an auto accident involving an out-of-control vehicle, the first question I wonder about is age. Was the driver a person of my years or older?

This association threatens to put me in the uncomfortable position of ageist, a person with stereotypes about old people. Just being old yourself does not protect you against this virus. To find myself classed among those who expect every older driver to be accident-prone would make me squirm.

The numbers show elders to be in fact at greater risk of accidents than most other drivers. As a group we rank above teenagers but that does not come as much consolation. Compared to other adults, we do worse although many of us have learned to compensate for driving deficiencies by modifying our habits. Thus we may no longer drive at night or on superhighways, for instance.

In reflecting on my own easy license renewal, I have to wonder if the Commonwealth of Massachusetts has fulfilled its responsibilities for ensuring public safety.  Should I have been given the right to drive from 75 to 80 without any official even looking at me?  I answered the questions truthfully but still the Commonwealth knows little or nothing about my physical and mental functioning.  Was it prudent to have kept me on the road, sight unseen?

These questions I recognize as, in a sense, not in my own self- interest. It may seem masochistic for me to quibble at a process that efficiently rewarded me with what I wanted. Only something verging perilously close to self-hatred, you might say, would make me doubt this well-oiled new system.

To my great good fortune, in some 57 years of driving I have never had a traffic accident. Not do I hear any complaints from family members or friends about the way I drive now. I, in my regular Sunday softball game, I can handle the bat well enough to manage a few base hits and then run around the bases, then I presumably have enough well-being to steer a car with some skill.

But that may change and the Commonwealth has no system in place to track my decline in driving capability. Should there not be some way, backed by public consensus, of tracking drivers of all ages for our fitness for the road?

In the meantime my approach will be to ask family members to be vigilant about my automotive skills as I point toward 80. I want them to advise me if and when they spot any decline. Then I may at least be able to modify my driving habits to enhance everyone’s  safety while still staying on the road.

Richard Griffin

Whipping Thomas

The assistant principal of the Eliot School in Boston whipped the hands of ten-year-old student, Thomas Whall, for one-half hour until they were covered with blood. This the school official did in front of the boy’s classmates, some of whom openly urged Thomas not to give in.

This incident happened in 1859 and began what now seems a curious series of events in an ongoing struggle between Protestants and Catholics over the public expression of religion. At issue here was the particular version of the Ten Commandments that students were required to recite aloud in the classroom.

By law, the schools had to use the words as written in the King James Bible. This involved a numbering of the commandments different from that used by Catholics, and also different phrasing.  Quite commonly, students would speak in unison and Catholics among them would slide over words to avoid punishment without betraying their own tradition.

Thomas Whall, however, was asked to read the words by himself and so he determined to take a stand. In doing so, he had the encouragement of his family, his pastor, and Catholics around the country. In fact, to the latter he became a hero of conscience and received gold medals and other gifts from many of his co-religionists.

Ultimately, the matter went to court and the judge ruled in favor of the schools. According to the judge, the action by the students and his abettors was a threat to the stability of the school system, “the granite foundation on which our republican form of government rests.”

I owe knowledge of this episode to John McGreevy, an historian at Notre Dame whose recent book, “Catholicism and American Freedom” begins with an account of this event. The author then goes on to detail many other clashes between mainstream ideas of freedom in the United States and contrary ideas held fast by Catholics.

Incidentally, though it never produced conflict, practice of religious recitation in the public schools of Belmont, Massachusetts during my own elementary school days stands out in my memory as having had that potential. Then we used to recite the 23rd Psalm (“The Lord Is My Shepherd”), and we also, as I recall, would say the Lord’s Prayer in the Protestant mode.

At that stage in history, however, no one made an issue of the practice, though now it would be regarded as a flagrant violation of church/state separation. As a Catholic, looking back, I regard saying those prayers in the classroom as something valuable in my education.

The movement since the 1960s whereby Protestants and Catholics have come to understand and appreciate one another’s religious traditions has rendered many past conflicts moot. The ecumenical approach to some controverted issues has helped us to value outlooks different from our own and, when conflicts do arise, to settle them peaceably.

Arguments about a particular translation of the Bible now appear as particularly unnecessary. Various versions in use among Protestants and Catholics have strengths and weaknesses but few people any longer consider them worth fighting over. In modern times, the King James version, in particular, enjoys the esteem of many Catholics for its unique beauty of language.

The same can be said about the wording of the Lord’s Prayer. The part that was once considered “Protestant,” namely the last part beginning “For thine is the kingdom,” is now recognized by many Catholics as part of their own heritage. In fact, a prayer in the Catholic Mass that derives from 1963 uses words that echo those used by Protestants.

The bedrock fact that brings together Catholics and Protestants is, of course, their sharing of the same Christian faith. It still seems bizarre for this reality to have been obscured for so much of the last few centuries. To this very day, people in Northern Ireland and elsewhere seem unaware of the basic religious identity they share with one another.

The incident at the Eliot School and its aftermath now seem almost quaint. Because it arose due to a set of assumptions we recognize as false, we can feel superior to the people involved in that drama. And yet at the time it stirred passions that were based in religious convictions and practice deeply held by members of faith communities involved.

If there is a moral to the story it may be this. When we find ourselves caught up in conflict involving religion, it may be important to look first to what we hold in common with our disputants before we go any further.

Richard Griffin

Ken Holway, Hero

On an evening in late June, my friend Kenneth Holway was riding with another police officer when they spotted black smoke coming from a Cambridge triple-decker apartment house. Without hesitation, Officer Holway and his partner stopped the car and ran to the top floor of the building from which the smoke was billowing.

There they found a  62-year-old resident, a man who was surrounded by flames. He already had serious burns on his legs that made it difficult to hold him. Nonetheless, with help from the other officer, my friend hoisted the resident on his shoulder and together they carried him down the staircase.

Last week I talked with Ken Holway about this harrowing experience. “It was one of those things: your adrenaline gets going,” he told me. Referring to the need for immediate action, he added: “If it was another second, he would have died.”

According to my friend, in a crisis situation like this you’re not sure what you are doing. What struck him most and made him act fast were two panicked words coming from the resident: “Help me.”

When I asked what went through his mind just after rescuing a fellow human from death, Ken Holway shared some of his reactions. “I collapsed down on the ground and thought ‘that could have been it.’ But you do what you have to do.”

Not surprisingly, he has relived the frightening experience in his mind many times. If he needed a reminder in succeeding days, his aching body helped bring him back to the event. “I felt sore physically,” he says.

In response to my questions about spiritual motivation, my friend, like just about everybody else, finds it difficult to talk about it. One thing is clear, however: the faith that has marked his whole life is vital for him. “It makes me feel good, going to church every Sunday,” he says of the power that comes from his religious practice.

In defying fire and smoke to rescue another person, my friend surely knew how much he was risking. The need for action left precious little time to think, but his thoughts undoubtedly turned toward his wife and children. He knew what they and he would lose if he did not emerge from the inferno.

His sworn duty to serve members of the community, however, trumped even his ties to loved ones at home. He had taken a police officer’s oath and it remained sacred enough to make him respond immediately when another’s life was threatened.

The exact words may not have echoed through his mind at the moment of pressing danger but his spirituality has almost surely been shaped by the words of Jesus: “Greater love than this no man has than to lay down his life for his friends.” In this instance, of course, the friend was simply a fellow member of the human community.

Facing danger in response to the call of duty is nothing new to this police officer. When still a teenager, he served his country in the Vietnam War. Only 20 on his return from military service, he determined to find other ways of serving the public and, years later, got the opportunity to join the Cambridge police force.

Ken Holway does not consider himself a hero, but I think him one. And I am not alone in this view of him. He has received letters from ten other residents of Cambridge, thanking him for serving our city so well. These other ten are unknown to him personally but he is touched that they have responded this way.

Knowing a hero up close is to me a spiritual gift. News of what he did has buoyed up my morale, giving me renewed hope for the human family. If this one man can respond to the call of duty like this, then perhaps the rest of us have greater possibilities than we usually dare think.

Not surprisingly, the excitement I first felt when reading about this event has receded. However, having a bond in friendship with a man who has shown such heroism continues to feed my spirit. Ken Holway thinks of himself modestly, but to me he embodies a nobility of soul that makes a difference.

Richard Griffin