Common Ground (80 page)

That was nothing compared to the furor the Cardinal stirred up that fall by condoning Jackie Kennedy’s marriage to Aristotle Onassis. The Vatican held that by marrying a divorced man, the President’s widow had “knowingly violated the law of the Church” and was ineligible to receive the sacraments. But Cushing staunchly defended her: “What a lot of nonsense! Only God knows who is a sinner and who is not. Why can’t she marry whomever she wants?” That brought him an avalanche of abusive mail, apparently reflecting the covert resentment many Boston Catholics felt for the privileged Kennedys. In a moment of intense depression, Cushing talked of resigning. “If they don’t understand me after thirty years,” he said, “they’ll never understand me.”

He had long yearned to retire and devote his remaining years to missionary work in Latin America, but Pope Paul insisted that he clear up his crushing financial deficit before leaving office. Obediently, Cushing launched a Jubilee Fund to raise $50 million, almost three-fifths of the deficit, but even with the help of professional fund raisers, it collected only $28 million. Proud of his ability to wring “dollars out of Plymouth Rock,” Cushing was devastated.

By 1969, the diseases which had gnawed at him for years—asthma, emphysema, bleeding ulcers, cancer of the prostate and kidneys—were taking a terrible toll. Gaunt, almost emaciated, he began drinking heavily to dull the pain. In his cups, he could be mawkishly self-pitying and abusive to priests (when a troubled young curate tried to consult him, Cushing snapped, “You don’t have enough brains to lose your faith! Go back to your parish!”). Yet he still gave off flashes of the old “Cush”: throwing out the first ball at Fenway Park; dancing a jig in an old folks’ home on Thanksgiving Day; reciting “The Face on the Barroom Floor” to an ancient recluse; hot-dogging at communion breakfasts; striding across the room to stick out a big paw and bellow, “My name’s Cushing—what’s yours?”; riding the roller coaster at Revere Beach or the bumper cars at Nantasket as a covey of nuns, their habits flapping in the wind, giggled in delight at their antic Archbishop; trying on an endless assortment of hats—football helmets and yarmulkes, fireman’s hats and straw boaters, baseball caps and Easter bonnets—symbols of his pragmatic, chameleon-like adaptation to a changing world.

But now his retirement was set—to coincide with his seventy-fifth birthday in August 1970—and speculation began to focus on his successor. Many names were mentioned—among them Bishop Bernard Flanagan of Worcester and Daniel Cronin, one of Boston’s auxiliary bishops. The popular favorite was probably John Cardinal Wright. As prefect of the Congregation for the Clergy, Wright was the highest-ranking American in the Vatican, an intellectual known both for his progressive social stands and for his increasing theological conservatism. A former secretary to both O’Connell and Cushing, Wright had hoped to succeed his old mentors in Boston, but relations had rarely been smooth between Wright and Cushing (when told Wright had his
eye on the episcopal throne, Cushing growled, “He may have his eye on it, but I’ve got my ass on it”). And Wright suffered from another major liability: among insiders he was believed to be a homosexual, a trait tolerated in cosmopolitan Rome, but a severe handicap in puritanical Boston.

Nevertheless, as a member of the powerful Congregation for the Bishops, Wright played a central role in selecting Cushing’s successor. He had private scores to settle; if he couldn’t have the job himself, he didn’t want one of his enemies to have it. Like Pope Paul, Wright regarded Cushing as a maverick, unreliable on such critical issues as
Humanae Vitae
. Along with other conservatives—among them Apostolic Delegate Raimondi and New York’s Terence Cardinal Cooke—he wanted Boston back in more orthodox hands. Humberto Medeiros was eminently safe in that regard.

Yet if conservatives found Medeiros convenient for their own reasons, so, ironically, did many liberals, who focused less on his theological orthodoxy than on his reputation as a social activist supporting Mexican farm workers in the Rio Grande Valley. Moreover, he was Portuguese, one of the Catholic nationalities long excluded from power in the American Church. For nearly a decade, the Vatican had been seeking to break up ethnic monopolies in American dioceses, and nowhere had one ethnic group dominated the Church so long and so thoroughly as in Boston. If O’Connell spoke for the lace-curtain Irish and Cushing for the Irish working class, so Boston’s dissident priests and laymen hoped Medeiros would be Archbishop of the dispossessed non-Irish. Father Tom Corrigan, a founder of the Association of Boston Urban Priests, welcomed him as “a unique and exciting choice.” The Catholic Interracial Council said Medeiros gave “every indication of being a spiritual leader of distinction.”

But Cushing himself wasn’t so sure. After sizing up his tiny, bespectacled successor, he began referring to him as “Birdy.” One day, as he sat with an aide gazing out his residence windows toward the statue of Our Lady of Fatima, the dying Cardinal mused, “Birdy’s going to take his rosary beads and trot around that statue out there saying his prayers. Then he’ll come back and find his problems are still here.”

Under the blazing Azorean sun, the whitewashed façade of Nossa Senhora de Saude Church dazzled his eyes until they ached. But the wooden pews, lit only by shafts of dusky light from the rose windows, were cool, tranquil, and consoling. That was Humberto Medeiros’ favorite spot, a refuge from the stern austerity of home and school, an intimation of glories reserved for those who served Christ with all their hearts. When he was barely seven Humberto began attending Mass every day, perched beside his aged grandmother in her black shawl; and by the time he took his first communion there four years later, he knew he wanted to be a priest. The Church dominated the village of Arrifes on São Miguel, the largest island in the Portuguese Azores, where Humberto was born in 1915. His father, Antônio de Sousa Medeiros, raised vegetables on the rocky hillsides and ran a small variety store in the village. But by 1923
he had fallen deeply in debt and set off for America seeking more profitable labor. Between 1923 and 1928, Antônio Medeiros made three trips to America, working at a Fall River cotton mill, a nearby truck farm, a New York construction site, and a California ranch. When his family’s turn arrived on the Portuguese immigration quota, he returned to Fall River, retrieved his job on the farm, and rented a tiny apartment on Davol Street.

In Arrifes, Maria Medeiros and her four children—Humberto, then fifteen; Leonel, thirteen; Manuel, eleven; and Natalie, eight—thought of America as a fairy-tale land, filled with incalculable riches. Arriving in April 1931, they were unprepared for the sour reality of Fall River’s North End. A narrow spit of land wedged between the muddy Taunton River and the industrial wastes of Watuppa Pond, the North End was a fierce ethnic battleground. In its streets and alleys jostled three mutually hostile immigrant groups: the Irish, who had settled there first in the 1850s, gradually appropriating the best jobs and political control of the city; the French Canadians, who arrived a quarter century later and, after decades of discrimination, were just getting a toehold on respectability; and the Portuguese, now the bottom of the heap. When a Portuguese boy walked down Davol Street, the Irish and French kids would shout, “Portuguese stink fish,” a gibe at the maritime stench which clung to his boots.

Although they lived virtually on top of each other, the three nationalities preserved separate institutional lives. There was St. Joseph’s, the Irish Church, St. Mathieu’s, the French church, and St. Michael’s, the Portuguese church, each delivering sermons in its own language, an essential for many immigrants who—like Maria Medeiros—never learned English. At first, the Medeiros children spoke little English either. Soon they were installed at the Danforth Street School, widely known as “the dumbbell school,” because it served children with learning disabilities, emotional problems, and records of minor delinquency. Although the Medeiros boys’ only disability was their language, every morning as they walked to school they endured the taunts of neighborhood kids.

But his teachers soon discovered that Humberto was no dumbbell. Recognizing not only exceptional intelligence but artistic aptitude in the young immigrant, they helped him enroll in New Bedford’s Swain School of Art. But that was a luxury the family could ill afford. By then the Depression was in full stride, cutting a terrible swath through Fall River’s cotton industry. Soon the city which had boasted more spindles than Manchester, England, was filled with unemployed textile workers clamoring for relief.

The winter of 1932–33 was a bitter one for the Medeiroses. When his oldest son turned sixteen, Antônio insisted that he quit school and help support the family. In late 1932, Humberto became a sweeper at the Sagamore Mills, cleaning the alleys between the spinning frames for sixty-two cents a day. But his determination to receive an education never slackened; every evening after work and on weekends he studied French, Latin, algebra, and English. Only
in January 1935, when his two brothers replaced him at the mill, could he return to school.

His preparations paid off handsomely. Admitted to Durfee High School as a sophomore, Humberto completed the four-year course in two and a half years, graduating first in his class of 651, compiling the best academic record in the school’s history, He starred in the debating and drama societies. At graduation ceremonies in June 1937, he delivered a stirring oration, concluding with a challenge from Horace Mann: “Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity!” His classmates bestowed on him no fewer than seven superlatives: most brilliant, most original, most dignified, most studious, most talented, most interesting, and most promising.

Yet his years at Durfee weren’t altogether happy ones. The school’s oldest student, he was an awkward youth with no athletic prowess, a future priest who didn’t drink, dance, or date, a “Portogee” in a school still dominated by the Irish, a figure so formidable his classmates held him in baffled, and uneasy, awe.

After the Fall River
News-Herald
lauded his academic record and described a mural of the Crucifixion he had painted for a Portuguese church, a wealthy Yankee widow named Florence Hutchinson offered to put him through Harvard. When Medeiros said he was going to be a priest, the Unitarian dowager decried the “terrible waste” of his talents, though she relented somewhat and contributed three hundred dollars toward his tuition at Washington’s Catholic University.

Nine years later, Medeiros returned to Fall River as a priest, assigned to St. John of God Church, the parish where his mural hung behind the altar. The city’s clergy were still rigidly Balkanized, grouped in Irish, French, and Portuguese “leagues,” rarely crossing ethnic boundaries. For five years as a young curate Medeiros made the narrow circuit of Portuguese parishes. He had every reason to believe he would end his days as pastor of one of those churches.

What changed everything was the patronage of Bishop James Cassidy, an autocratic Irishman with a potent voice in Fall River politics. Cassidy knew that the Irish monopoly on his diocese couldn’t last forever; one day soon a Portuguese priest would have to rise in the hierarchy. For years he had been watching Medeiros, and in 1950, when the young priest returned from a year of doctoral study in Rome, the Bishop took not one, but two unprecedented steps. He placed Medeiros at Holy Name Church, a lace-curtain Irish parish on the hill, and he named him assistant to the chancellor of the diocese. Under Cassidy’s successor, James Connolly, his advancement was even more rapid: Vicar for Religious, vice-chancellor, and, soon, chancellor.

Those who knew Medeiros then detected little ambition for promotion. His thirst was for learning—already he had accumulated four degrees (including the prized doctorate in sacred theology) and nine languages (Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, German, French, and English). He often thought he would be happier teaching at a seminary or university. With
his close friend Father John Driscoll, he wondered why any priest would accept the bishop’s miter, with all its financial and administrative responsibilities.

But by then his advancement was inevitable. After Medeiros was named Bishop of Brownsville in June 1966, Driscoll rushed to his friend’s rectory, where a celebration was underway. “Well?” he asked.

Medeiros looked up at him with a melancholy smile. “Like all the others,” he said, “I took it.”

Hardly an ecclesiastical plum, Brownsville was so remote that Medeiros had to look it up in an atlas. One of the nation’s smallest dioceses, it had only 234,700 Catholics and 82 priests spread out over 4,226 square miles. Most of its communicants were desperately poor Mexican-American farm workers, earning eighty-five cents an hour in the fields, struggling to feed large families on twenty to thirty dollars a week. The nation’s newest diocese, carved from the Corpus Christi region only eleven months before, Brownsville had been without a bishop since the first incumbent died in Germany on his way to take up the assignment. Medeiros was literally starting from scratch—with only the sparest of resources. Moreover, he was to arrive in Brownsville at a critical juncture in the valley’s history. On June 1, Cesar Chavez’s United Farm Workers had called fruit pickers out on strike at Starr County’s melon farms, demanding a $1.25-an-hour minimum wage and union recognition. But the growers continued to harvest the crops with the help of Mexican “green-carders,” so called because they had green permits authorizing them to cross the Rio Grande every day to work in the valley. The union, of course, regarded them as strikebreakers.

In the weeks between the start of the strike and Medeiros’ arrival, the Church had already become deeply embroiled in the conflict. Clerical intervention came not from Brownsville, where the clergy was notoriously cautious, but from the Archdiocese of San Antonio, 250 miles to the north. San Antonio’s Archbishop, Robert E. Lucey, was a fighting liberal, nationally known for his activism on behalf of the poor, minorities, and unions. Within days the Bishop’s Committee for the Spanish-Speaking had dispatched food and clothing to the valley, followed quickly by three priests, who held rallies and Masses for the farm workers. One of them stood on the steps of the county courthouse and said, “These people are going to march and march until they have their rights and we’re going to be marching with them every step of the way.”