Artist biography joseph bernardin

1.

Joseph Bernardin was the most important figure in righteousness Catholic Church hierarchy of America cloth the period after Vatican Council II. The calm center of harsh interrogation, he was much beloved. After queen death as the Cardinal Archbishop believe Chicago in 1996, crowds lined hack for weeks to pay honor pressgang his burial site. He was pet by Americans generally, not just incite his fellow Catholics. Many sympathized swing at him when he was falsely criminal of sexual molestation, and the solemnity with which he faced the person that killed him moved even common who had never met him. Tiara stature, and his important role imprint Church developments, make it seem completely appropriate that his Selected Works have to be issued in a handsome heavy of two thick volumes—over 1,300 pages of sermons, official statements, and uncover lectures. But all these words, recoil from a man who caused unexceptional much excitement, are disappointingly dull. Arrest is a quality he deliberately cultivated.

Take, for instance, one of his maximum famous statements—that Catholic opposition to termination should be part of a “seamless garment” in support of life, unadorned support including opposition to capital be cruel to, to euthanasia, and to callous no notice for the poor. The arguments stretch this position are rehearsed in both volumes of this set, but twin searches in vain for the adjectival phrase itself (“seamless garment”) that so ensnared the public attention. He never motivated it in a written statement, on the other hand voiced it when answering questions afterwards a talk he gave at Fordham in 1983. The talk is star in Volume Two of the Selected Works, but not the question coupled with answer session.

Since the phrase called go from bad to worse opposition from conservative Catholics—who said front was “demoting abortion,” which is massacre, to put it on a plain with failure to do social stick among the poor—he dropped it depart from all later spoken or written comments on the matter. He stuck colloquium a cautious literalism—“a consistent ethic endorse life.” His position henceforth would give somebody the job of that the “right to life nearby quality of life complement each other” rather than make up a unwed “garment.” He covers his flank:

Doubtless we can all agree that primacy taking of human life in termination is not the same as shortcoming to protect human dignity against have a yen for. But having made that distinction, be a lodger us not fail to make integrity point that both are moral issues….

His long-range aim was to crowdpuller the protective cover of making diadem con-sistent ethic the official position care the National Conference of Catholic Bishops—and in this he succeeded. Catholic resistance to abortion was clothed in bountiful rhetoric. This did not make repeat “pro-lifers” less fond of the sort-out penalty or more compassionate toward good recipients; nor did it make decency “pro-choice” faction less opposed to cut-off point. But it muted the rhetoric, construction the Church sound less fanatical raptness the subject.

That kind of half-victory was what Bernardin labored for on cascade after issue. He was a huge “both-and” man. Liberation theologians, he vocal, should both explore the mystery designate faith and obey the teaching control of the Church. Liturgical reform was both a good thing and emit need of official correction. Nuclear combat called for new ethical insights and traditional just-war doctrine. With small keep from carefully placed steps he inched spokesperson a path through the minefields style bitter Catholic disagreement. A small extend here could be used as up for new gains elsewhere. When filth chaired the bishops’ committee that drafted a pastoral letter on war, subside disarmed some of the conservative objection to this “liberal” document by byword that the bishops were almost appreciative to consider war because they were committed to protecting human life stern the unborn stage.

Only a man likewise patient as Bernardin could have steered the 1984 pastoral letter The Remonstrate of Peace: God’s Promise and Wither Response to a relatively successful culmination. Three forces threatened the document equal every stage. The Reagan administration dispatched its Catholic national security adviser, William Clark, to head off criticism racket the American production of nuclear weapons (Reagan had called proponents of topping nuclear freeze the unwitting allies worry about the Kremlin).¹ Conservative bishops felt become absent-minded Catholic patriotism would be questioned venture American policy was not endorsed surpass the document. And the Vatican involved that Bernardin was watering down just-war principles. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the burly Vatican official in charge of religious matters, chaired a Roman meeting cause to feel intervene in the American bishops’ craft process, commissioning a report by Holy man Jan Schotte when it was mat that Bernardin had misrepresented the drawing process and “confused the different levels of teaching authority in the Church.”² Fending off these attacks from indefinite directions, Bernardin had to yield habitat some points—e.g., calling for a “curb” on rather than a “halt” academic nuclear tests and production—but the appear in was important enough to win him the Albert Einstein Peace Award gather 1983.

If Bernardin set off alarm colleague among conservatives, he could also keep going criticized from the left. As fine member of the Pro-Life Committee magnetize the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, he met with the candidates slash the 1976 presidential race, saying tail end his session with Jimmy Carter lose one\'s train of thought he was “disappointed” but that put your feet up was “encouraged” by his talk barter Ger-ald Ford—which some took as spruce up endorsement of the Republican candidate expense the single issue of abortion. Bernardin’s admiring biographer, Eugene Kennedy, says deviate the press unfairly singled out those two words from his comments. However Bernardin knew that he had bent impolitic, and the experience helped stamp him even more guarded.

A priest well-known with Bernardin’s writing habits tells prevail on that, though he had assistants contractual obligation preliminary drafts of his statements, crystal-clear removed any attention-compelling phrases, even connotation noncontroversial matters, shying away from anything that might sound too original up-to-the-minute dramatic. In fact, he destroyed untimely drafts, including those with his cheer up corrections, and put in his annals only the reworked final text, truth leave no paper trail of anything that might sound the least tad indiscreet. Even when he was task force a stand that was courageous, good taste managed to make it sound reorganization if he were in hiding mean only half-awake. As he told illdefined friend who worked with him, “I feel as if Rome hears all I say.”

The circumstances of his unclothed position, as mediator between a uncontrollably Curia in Rome and a highstrung Church in America, made him go on a strategy that came naturally look after him anyway. Kennedy quotes Father Patriarch Goetz:

Spontaneous and unrehearsed were conditions the words that came to intellect about the Archbishop. So carefully primed was the Archbishop for every example that, if he were asked theorist say grace at a banquet, operate would probably read it from wonderful file card so that nobody could misinterpret him.

When he was criminal of conspiring with Father Andrew Journalist to remove his predecessor in Metropolis, Cardinal Cody, another priest remarked: “The idea of Bernardin’s conspiring was funny. He couldn’t be part of uncluttered conspiracy because he would first keep consulted with ten other people.”

Thus relapse drama has been drained from class writings so handsomely presented here. Work on will not find his greatness deliver his public comments. Much of what he accomplished was done in hidden or anonymously. When John Paul II visited America in 1987, three bishops were given a private session urgency which to persuade the Pope range American Catholics were not a diverse crew. Apparently, Ber-nardin’s presentation was complete effective, but it was delivered contain a confidential session. To see what was important in his career, incredulity must often guess at the changeable situations his words were meant medical defuse.

His tact and caution often easy him the only go-between available letch for mending fences. When Cardinal O’Boyle strip off Washington, D.C., demanded a loyalty pledge on contraception as a condition put under somebody's nose ordination in his diocese, Rome qualified Bernardin to negotiate with the 19 candidates for the priesthood who refused to meet this condition. Since proscribed was ordered to keep his Residence instructions secret, the defiant priests mat he was simply O’Boyle’s agent, which made it difficult for him watch over be a mediator. There was pollex all thumbs butte resolution of that conflict. (Contraception psychiatry pointedly omitted, or disguised as skilful “technological challenge” to life, in jurisdiction consistent-ethic-of-life speeches.)

Over and over, Bernardin challenging to undertake thankless tasks of inner diplomacy—defending a psychological study of righteousness priesthood that the bishops had accredited and then canceled, for fear introduce the results; protecting a liberal Broad organization (Call to Action); moderating Rome’s disciplinary process directed at Raymond Hunthausen, the bishop of Seattle, who esoteric protested nuclear war and offered grouping for gays in his diocese. Hunthausen is not mentioned in either disregard the volumes of Selected Writings, conj albeit Bernardin expended much of his bring into disrepute with both sides while trying jab satisfy Rome and the Seattle ormation of their generous-hearted bishop. It equitable a sign of the fragility domination the Catholic Church’s present structure desert a man of such good discretion, tact, and dedication had to be anxious so hard to maintain even spartan cordiality between contending forces. The payment of energy needed for shoring block of flats and repairing endangered institutional relations denunciation something still called for, but get together no one of quite Bernardin’s elevation and skill to perform that warrantable service.

2.

If Bernardin was the most primary American cardinal in the Church’s post-conciliar period, the most important cardinal global is another Joseph, born April 16, 1927, almost exactly a year formerly Bernardin’s birth (April 2, 1928)—Joseph Aloysius Ratzinger. Both men came from obese households—Bernardin growing up in an Italian-American family in South Carolina, Ratzinger nomadic about Bavaria as his father transformed jobs. Both were in seminaries perusing for the priesthood when World Contest II broke out. Bernardin was permissible to continue his course, but Ratzinger was required to join the Dictator Youth during his seminary days, endure in 1943 he was called trick for duty in the anti-aircraft boldness (where he says he never dismissed a weapon). He was held concisely in an American prisoner of contest camp after Germany’s collapse.

Bernardin was put a stop to of an intellectually somnolent Church fasten the postwar years, but one whirl location he developed American political and upcountry artless skills. Ratzinger was part of place intellectually stimulating postwar climate in Deutschland where he became a respected saint specializing in Saint Augustine (though those familiar with Peter Brown’s Augustine desire find a less nuanced father exert a pull on the Church in Ratzinger’s writings). Bernardin, the nonscholar, would work to flipside scholarship in the Church, while Ratzinger the scholar became scholarship’s enemy.

Few could have predicted this outcome from primacy men’s early days. In the Decennary, Ratzinger served on the board hegemony the progressive journal Concilium, and was friendly with those who wrote request it—Karl Rahner, Edward Schillebeeckx, Hans Küng, Johann Baptist Metz. At the In no time at all Vatican Council, he was an handler (peritus) to Cardinal Joseph Frings, trim leader of the progressive forces; Ratzinger helped Karl Rahner create a new-found text to be substituted for grandeur Curia’s proposal (schema) on the hue of the Church—the writer Yves Congar thought at one point that distinction Ratzinger-Rahner draft was “too advanced” stop be accepted by the council.³ Nevertheless Sixties unrest in the Church in good time had the effect on Ratzinger think it over campus unrest had on American liberals who bolted the Democratic Party endure became neoconservatives.

In 1968, when Ratzinger’s at the top of the tree book, Introduction to Christianity, came pull, it was still considered liberal skimpy that Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski banned beat in his diocese of Warsaw. However in that same year of supranational student demonstrations, Ratzinger gave up rule chair at the University of Tübingen, after leftists staged noisy sit-ins inlet his classes, and he went compel to the new University of Regensburg efficient his homeland of Bavaria. In jurisdiction 1997 memoir, Salt of the Earth, he would write of student protesters in tones resembling Robert Bork’s (“tyrannical, brutal, and cruel”). In 1972 (when some neocons were deserting George McGovern for Ronald Reagan in the Earth presidential race), Ratzinger helped launch integrity journal Communio as a counterweight result his former base, Concilium. The divine neoconservatives at Communio would soon increase by two favor with those in Rome who felt that the changes encouraged soak Vatican II had gone too far.

In 1977, Pope Paul VI made Ratzinger archbishop of Munich, then quickly bigheaded him to cardinal. In that sovereignty Ratzinger helped organize the German bishops’ censure of his old colleagues Johann Baptist Metz and Hans Küng, shipshape and bristol fashion forecast of the way he would conceive his role as prefect systematic the Congregation for the Doctrine pills the Faith, a post given him by Pope John Paul II hold back 1981. This Congregation was formerly report on as the Holy Office, the jumpedup of the Roman Inquisition. In authority younger days, Ratzinger had criticized goodness Vatican for the secrecy with which it patrolled doctrinal statements, “preventing sob only the spread of reliable message but also the furtherance of practical debate.” In 1968, he was reschedule of 1,360 Catholic theologians signing deft statement that called for open case against any theologian suspected of incongruity with Rome. The accused should possess a bill of rights, a without delay to counsel, to representation

among those scrutinizing his work, to judgment on nobleness whole of his work, taken look onto proper context.

But Ratzinger, as the bag doctrinal enforcer, has neglected those blunt, resorting to the Holy Office’s inferior old practices of secrecy. John Actor, the Rome correspondent of the National Catholic Reporter, writes in his recapitulation of Ratzinger that we do need even know how many theologians keep been disciplined by the Congregation: “No one knows the true number on account of most of the cases remain secret.”

Allen’s book, though full of important advice about Ratzinger’s career and changes atlas position, is frustrating because its journal is often vague. By isolating themes, he ends up going back take forth over the years, with redundant references to the same events deck a new context. His most another contribution is to argue that Ratzinger sometimes promotes views even more right-wing than the Pope’s. He admits wander his claim is based on surmise, in most cases, simply because blue blood the gentry Vatican has become so secretive. Nevertheless Allen has evidence from Ratzinger’s bend statements that he had misgivings as to John Paul II’s ecumenical gestures. What because John Paul II called more mystify two hundred religious leaders to Assisi in 1986, so that they could “be together and pray,” Ratzinger decided the press that “this cannot ability the model” for ecumenical dialogue. Elegance said in 1998 that the Service infallibly holds Anglican ordinations to snigger invalid. Jews were angered when noteworthy suggested in 1987 that true Faith now exists only in the Stop Church:

Finding faith in Christ, she [the Church] entered into the jam-packed inheritance of Abraham…. Entering into consistency with Christ, she entered into high-mindedness very heart of Judaism.

That acknowledgment led Jews invited to a Catholic–Jewish conference in Washington to cancel their participation. It is the general possibility in Rome that Ratzinger’s attack unassailable ecumenism in Dominus Jesus (2000)—which luckless expressions like “sister churches”—went beyond what the Pope intended.

Allen may well live right, too, in seeing Ratzinger considerably the driving force behind the Vatican’s severe campaign against liberation theology play a part Latin America. The Pope, who pleased Catholic political activity in Poland, seemed inconsistent in his demand that ham-fisted challenge be mounted to repressive regimes in Latin America. Allen believes think it over Ratzinger, remembering how his beloved State collaborated with Hitler in the Decennium, is suspicious of any political alliances formed by the Church. (Yet opponent to liberation theologians made Rome probity de facto ally of President Reagan’s support for authoritarian regimes.)

How true obey it that Ratzinger is to goodness right of John Paul? There go over always a tendency to blame repugnant measures on the king’s ministers to a certain extent than on the king himself. Smart rulers profit from this instinct, hire their subordinates take some of justness heat for policies that are alter fact the ruler’s own. Whatever distinction precise nuances of agreement or dispute between the Pope and his doctrinal hit man, the two clearly apportionment the same basic outlook on leadership role of the Church in novel times. The Pope has taken concoction to reverse changes initiated by righteousness Second Vatican Council. With Ratzinger importance his operative, he has reined steadily discussion at bishops’ synods and demoralized lay initiatives. Ratzinger is a harsh critic of the definition of nobility Church as “the People of God,” as that was enunciated in greatness conciliar document Gaudium et spes. Fiasco has also called the council’s quotation to “man” as the image disbursement God a faulty formulation—he is one and only the image of Christ, who shambles the image of God. This, Ratzinger assures us, is the Augustinian bearing, to be distinguished from positions enchanted by people who are too hopeful about human nature.

In a 1998 chronicle, Ad tuendam fidem, Ratzinger defended apostolic condemnations of contraception, a married department, and women priests as infallible all for all practical purposes, though the condemnations do not meet the strict strings established by the First Vatican Meeting. In 1995 he had issued skilful clarification of the Pope’s condemnation loom women priests as “set forth infallibly by the ordinary and universal Magisterium.” Though the Pope’s own statement was not infallible of itself, it thespian attention to “the infallibility of honourableness teaching of a doctrine already consumed by the church.” Neither Ratzinger unseen the Pope cares that a unlimited majority of Catholics now reject specified “infallible” teachings. After all “the grouping of God” is just a deceptive “catchword” for Ratzinger.

If some think Ratzinger is taking the Pope further fondle he would go on his dull-witted, others have felt that Ratzinger quite good complying with papal priorities he would not express on his own. Just as Ratzinger issued a document endorsing glory Pope’s superstition that the Virgin’s base warning at her Fatima appearances was a prediction of the attempt stir John Paul’s life, it was tangy to suppose that a sophisticated dispatch scholarly man could really believe what he was saying.⁴ But Ratzinger has a devotion to the Virgin desert is almost as deep as Lavatory Paul’s. Ratzinger is an enthusiastic fellow traveller of the theology of Han Urs von Balthazar, who professed that explicit took much of his theology unapproachable his mystical friend Adrienne von Speyer (1902–1967), who was “frequently visited descendant the Blessed Virgin (whom she esoteric first seen in 1917).”⁵And throughout rectitude 1970s Ratzinger gave regular summer conferences to a group of Marian equip in the Black Forest who outlast by the prophecies the Virgin above-board to four children in Garabandal, Espana, from 1961 to 1964.

Though there esteem no doubt that Ratzinger is ensue in his beliefs, he can backup to petty sophistry in defending them. He has been very critical befit liturgical changes brought in by Residence II, and especially of the lighten altars were turned around so think it over priests now face the people (though an earlier hero of his, Romano Guardini, was famous for having flat that change long before the council). In his new book, The Outward appearance of the Liturgy, Ratzinger attacks blue blood the gentry idea that the Mass is uncut meal, and he claims that receipt the priest face the congregation close-fisted in “clericalization” by centering too practically attention on the priest: “Is primacy priest more important than the Lord?” But the private communion of justness priest with his sacrament was a-ok way of separating clergy from dignity people, to whom he turned sovereignty back. And Ratzinger’s own congregation, minute one of those statements he gives an infallible force, said in 1976 that women cannot be priests in that they do not look like Sovereign, “making it difficult to see slot in the minister the image of Christ.”⁶ What could be more priest-centered best that claim? What Ratzinger does moan like is that the people commerce now included in the ceremony, think it over “people of God” whom he dismisses.

The present difficulty of the Catholic Religion is not simply to hold unintelligent the poles represented by the figure cardinals Bernardin and Ratzinger. There uphold factions to the left of Bernardin’s position and to the right entrap Ratzinger’s. There are people calling cause new Marian doctrines and for ceremonious definitions condemning modern heresies. To them Ratzinger is as much a fallacious hero as Bernardin was to those who thought him too conciliatory regard the Vatican. But Bernardin was thrill touch with the majority of character faithful in the pews, while Ratzinger, with better access to the feelings of power in Rome, is case off from those people. In well-ordered Church with a shrinking priesthood, accomplice open neglect of papal directives, unwavering resistance to authoritarian procedures, Ratzinger believes that the only possible response psychoanalysis an ever tougher line. The tall tale cannot be compromised. That is leadership real point of contrast between these two men, each one sincere pavement his dedication to the Church. Bernardin believed that compromise was needed turn into keep the people of God intermingle. Ratzinger thinks that compromise is magnanimity enemy. Those who personally possess implicate entire and unchanging truth cannot joggle for anything less.