Common Ground (76 page)

Charlestown was equally offended. Never one of the Cardinal’s admirers, Alice McGoff found in his remarks new justification of her low opinion. But whatever the Townies might think of him, they would never stone a holy man. It was unthinkable. What were they, Alice asked herself—animals? For the Cardinal even to hint at such a thing suggested how utterly out of touch he was. Powder Keg, in an official statement, admonished the Cardinal: “Forget not the ancient prophecy, ‘Judge not and ye shall not be judged.’ ” And it expressed great regret that “a member of the organization which, for centuries, has been held in such high esteem and long-cherished honor would be reluctant to enter a town that was constructed with some of God’s most valued tools.” Moe Gillen, as chairman of the Charlestown Committee on Education, wrote to the Cardinal:

The Cardinal agreed to the meeting and, on the afternoon of May 21, he received a Charlestown delegation in his Chancery office. The encounter between
the Archdiocese and its aggrieved Charlestown parishes had the tone of a summit meeting. Seated with the Cardinal at the polished wood table were Chancellor Thomas Daily; Father John Boles, Archdiocesan Director of Education; and Bishop Ruocco. On the Townie side of the table were Moe Gillen; John Gardiner and Bob O’Brien of the Kennedy Center; Barbara Burns, a psychologist from the Bunker Hill Health Center; Mary Parker, treasurer of Powder Keg; and Fathers Boyle and Joy.

The Cardinal began with an apology. Though his remarks had looked harsher in the newspaper than he had intended, he now conceded that they were “unfortunate.” He had only meant to explain why he felt his presence in South Boston or Charlestown would be counterproductive, in fact would only contribute to the tumult. “But if I have hurt any of you by my statements, I am humbly sorry for it.”

If the people of Charlestown had been hurt, Moe Gillen replied, it was only because they had such deep respect for the Cardinal and for the Church he represented. Anything the Cardinal said naturally attracted a wide audience. For that very reason, they were eager to clear up any misunderstandings he might have. Charlestown was not as violent as it appeared. The Education Committee, of which he was chairman, and which was supported by a broad cross section of the Town, had worked hard to maintain peace and order in the community. They hadn’t always succeeded, but surely there had never been—nor would there ever be—any danger to the Cardinal himself. If he would honor them with his presence, he would be received with the same devotion Charlestown had accorded all his predecessors.

If evidence for that was needed, it was there at his elbow. All through the hour-long meeting, Mary Parker fixed the Cardinal with a reverential gaze. Mary was the hard-liner in the Charlestown delegation—an officer of Powder Keg, an adamant opponent of busing, a determined foe of the Cardinal’s position on the issue. Yet she was also a devout Catholic and never in her sixty-three years had she expected to be seated across the table from her Archbishop. When introduced to him, she inclined her head slightly as she would before an altar; when he spoke, she nodded in silent affirmation; and when she addressed him, it was in a voice filled with deference, if not awe. Whatever Medeiros had done to offend the people of Charlestown, it had barely diminished the power and mystery inherent in the office of Cardinal Archbishop of Boston.

A
fter the arid, mesquite-and-chaparral plains of mid-Texas, the lower Rio Grande Valley is a balm to the burning eye and scorched palate. Lush green fields run with the river, squared off by towering palms, and the air is sweet with oranges, lemons, and grapefruit. At Brownsville, where the café-au-lait Rio Grande empties into the aquamarine Gulf, the smell of freshly harvested fruit, waiting to be towed North, is overpowering. With some justification, the Chamber of Commerce calls Brownsville “the Citrus Garden of Eden.”

In May 1970, Bishop Humberto Sousa Medeiros of Brownsville was at work in his office when he received a most important telephone call. Luigi Raimondi, Apostolic Delegate to the United States, the Pope’s representative in America, required his presence in Washington at the first opportunity.

On June 1, Medeiros flew to the capital and met with Raimondi at his residence. Only then did the delegate inform him that Pope Paul VI wished to name him Archbishop of Boston.

The Bishop’s first reaction was characteristic. “Your Excellency,” he said, “would you mind if we prayed for a bit?” The two prelates went downstairs to the delegate’s private chapel, where they knelt together in silent prayer. When they returned upstairs, Medeiros said that he was both honored and disconcerted by the appointment: the nation’s second-largest diocese and perhaps its most prestigious, Boston was a staggering responsibility, its retiring Archbishop, Richard Cardinal Cushing, a legendary figure impossible to replace in Boston’s affections. And there was something else worrying Medeiros. “Tell me,” he asked, “does the Holy Father realize what he has done, appointing a Portuguese-American to be Archbishop of Boston?”

“Oh yes,” said Raimondi, “I’m sure the Holy Father realizes what he has done.”

“I mean,” said the Bishop, “does he realize what it’s equivalent to?”

“No,” said the puzzled delegate. “What is it equivalent to?”

“Gethsemane,” said the Bishop.

The garden to which Jesus withdrew on the evening before the Crucifixion and where Judas eventually betrayed him, “Gethsemane” is a chilling code word for Christ’s agony, but it accurately reflected Medeiros’ apprehensions about Boston. The son of immigrants from the Portuguese Azores, he had come of age in Fall River—fifty miles south of Boston—where he had got a taste of ethnic warfare, Massachusetts style. To many Fall River Irish, the Portuguese—or “Portogees,” as they were invariably known—were only one step above the Negroes, and Humberto’s schoolmates hadn’t hesitated to remind him where he stood in the pecking order. Even as a parish priest and eventually as chancellor in the Fall River Diocese, he never won full acceptance from the Irish, who regarded the Church as their own domain. Frequent visits to Boston had convinced him that prejudice toward his people was, if anything, even greater there. From the Rio Grande’s citrus garden—where he had become a hero to the Mexican-American farm workers—Boston must indeed have seemed like the garden of Gethsemane.

Medeiros’ fears were not unfounded. When his appointment was announced, the city’s Irish Catholics were stunned. For 124 years, the bishops of Boston had been men of Irish descent, and since the turn of the century, the hierarchy—from chancellor down through the lowliest parish priest—had been overwhelmingly Irish. Even the Italians, ever more numerous in the diocese, found it difficult to rise in Boston’s Church. Now the faithful were being asked to accept as their new bishop not only a non-Irishman, but a Portuguese, one of the olive-skinned immigrants they had long regarded as third-class Catholics.

Shock waves from his appointment were felt first in rectories and convents throughout the diocese, where much of the Irish clergy saw it as a threat to their historic prerogatives. Though some of the younger priests welcomed the appointment of an outsider as a breath of fresh air, others expressed their dismay in unmistakable terms. In some rectories, the priests revived a ditty composed years before in a different context:

The clergy’s astonishment was echoed by their congregations. Grumbling could be heard, particularly in the city’s working-class districts, about “that little Portogee” or the “spic Archbishop.” And a few—a tiny handful, undoubtedly—took more direct action. In the weeks before he was to arrive, the Boston Chancery received several anonymous phone calls threatening Medeiros’ life or Church property. On October 6, hours after he landed in Boston to take up his new responsibilities, a cross was burned on the Chancery lawn. The next evening, following his installation, intruders ransacked Newman House, the Catholic student center at Boston University, and shortly before midnight, a fire—clearly the work of arsonists—severely damaged the Archdiocesan
Television Center and adjacent St. Jerome’s Chapel. Later, a pipe bomb was discovered in the Chancery doorway. After the bomb squad disarmed it, police protection was redoubled there and around the Archbishop’s residence.

These were disconcerting portents for Medeiros’ tenure in Boston. But they were only one aspect of his reception, which was generally courteous, even enthusiastic. After 350 persons—among them Governor Sargent and Mayor White—greeted him at Logan Airport, state police escorted his motorcade to Cushing’s residence, where he met privately with the desperately ill seventy-five-year-old Cardinal. Then the press was ushered into the room and Cushing spoke warmly of Medeiros: “He is a fine man, one of the finest members of the whole American hierarchy. I welcome him to the Archdiocese of Boston.” Acknowledging the contrast in their temperaments—“we are two different types of men”—he put the most favorable construction on it: “He represents the higher type of man and he will lead our people closer to the Divine Master.” Near tears, the Cardinal broke off and gazed sadly down at the floor. There was a long, awkward pause until someone asked Medeiros how it felt to be Cushing’s successor.

“I will answer that,” Medeiros replied, “by asking Cardinal Cushing for his blessing.” He knelt on the floor before the Cardinal, who, rising unsteadily to his feet, intoned the ancient blessing of the Church in a half-audible whisper. Medeiros kissed Cushing’s ring, and the old Cardinal, obviously moved, embraced him.

The next afternoon, after Boston’s new Archbishop had been installed in solemn rites at the Cathedral of the Holy Cross, he spoke to the crowd of 2,500 faithful in humble tones which contrasted sharply with the splendor of the occasion. “I do not know how to serve you as your bishop, your shepherd, your father and your brother, with any show of oratory or philosophy,” he said. “I cannot rely on any power of my own. Personally I feel too weak and too small for the task entrusted to me by the Holy Father. But I believe I can do all things in Him who is our strength and with your indispensable and loving cooperation.”

Whatever he said that day would have been lost in a more powerful drama. Cushing was so consumed by cancer that few of his advisers had expected him to appear at the Cathedral, but he summoned his waning energies and hobbled painfully at the rear of the great procession, taking his place in the sanctuary, where he sat erect but haggard through the long ceremony. Finally a microphone was set before him, and the bishop who had presided over the Archdiocese for twenty-six years said goodbye in a voice drained of its once robust timbre. “Today we welcome—and warmly welcome—a new Archbishop. He is in the prime of his life, rich in character and ability, and full of promise for the years ahead…. I can assure our new bishop that nowhere in God’s good world will he find more earnest collaborators, more willing hands and hearts to assist him, more fervent prayers in support of all his endeavors.”

Then, his voice trembling with emotion, he bid farewell: “Whatever time
is left for me, whatever pain or suffering, I offer joyfully for the Church that I have loved and tried to serve for three quarters of a century. Pray for me, as I pray for you—and God bless you all.” At that, the vast throng surged to its feet and—with the new Archbishop now a neglected spectator—gave the aged Cardinal a five-minute ovation.

Even after the crozier of authority had changed hands, Medeiros was eclipsed by his predecessor. For three weeks the two bishops shared the episcopal residence on Commonwealth Avenue, Medeiros an uneasy guest in his own house, until Cushing drew his last breath on November 2. His passing provoked a massive outpouring of sorrow and affection. In four days of official mourning, more than half a million people filed past the burgundy-draped catafalque. Thousands more surrounded the Cathedral, standing ten deep along Washington Street, as eleven Cardinals and fifty bishops led the funeral procession. And once they had bid farewell to “this valiant newsmaker, this holy man, this zealous priest, this uncommon prelate,” the Cardinal’s broad-brimmed scarlet hat was hoisted high above the altar, where it hung beside Cardinal O’Connell’s, there to cast its potent shadow on his successor for years to come.

If Humberto Medeiros was an alien graft on the sturdy frame of Boston’s Irish Catholicism, so the first Massachusetts Catholics were loathsome eruptions in the Puritan body politic. To the “visible saints” who founded their communal life in compact with a fierce Protestant God, Roman Catholicism was the doctrine of the Antichrist, reeking with superstition, idolatry, and despotism. At first, this horror was largely visceral; straying into a Catholic service, John Adams found it “most awful and affecting; the poor wretches, fingering their beads, chanting Latin, not a word of which they understood; their Pater Nosters and Ave Marias; their holy water; their crossing themselves perpetually; their bowing and kneeling and genuflecting.” This revulsion was reinforced by more palpable fears of French-Canadian Catholics, “who by their subtle insinuations industriously labor to debauch, seduce and withdraw the Indians from their due obedience unto his Majesty.” For years, Guy Fawkes Day—the anniversary of a Catholic plot to blow up the Houses of Parliament—was celebrated in Boston as Pope Day, with rival gangs from the North End and the South End, each carrying horrible effigies of the Pope and the devil, doing battle on the Common. Revolutionary pamphleteers exploited Boston’s anti-Catholicism by equating British tyranny with popery. Only gratitude for France’s assistance in the Revolution, and the need to neutralize Catholic Quebec, led Massachusetts to pass a statute of toleration in 1780.