Common Ground (82 page)

Though a bishop’s proclamations were often ineffectual, his actions could sometimes be decisive. As early as 1973, many churchmen realized that Boston’s Catholic schools might provide havens for refugees from busing, thus undermining desegregation. The parochial schools had good reasons to take what advantage they could from the situation. In Boston, as elsewhere, Catholic school enrollment had fallen off sharply since the mid-sixties—partly as a result of declining birth rates, partly because thousands of middle-class Catholics had moved to the suburbs, partly because Catholics were less committed to sectarian education than in years gone by, and partly because a shortage of teaching nuns compelled schools to hire lay teachers at substantial salaries and thus sharply increase tuitions. Between 1965 and 1973, archdiocesan enrollment fell from 151,582 to 86,469, while more than a hundred Catholic schools closed their doors. Pastors and Sisters, struggling to keep their schools afloat, would presumably take any students they could get.

In February 1974, the Archdiocesan Board of Education—which Medeiros headed—sought to stem the expected influx by prohibiting all but a few special transfers into the city’s parochial schools. But this policy was deeply flawed, exempting 172 Catholic schools in the suburbs, many of which promptly admitted “refugees” from the city. During 1974–75, the sharp decline in parochial enrollment leveled off, while high school attendance even rose slightly.

This touched off a bitter struggle within the Church. Progressive priests and laymen demanded an airtight policy prohibiting all transfers, while Catholic schools warned that such a policy would put them out of business and Catholic parents asked how the Cardinal dared bar their children from schools built with their grandfathers’ hard-earned dimes and nickels. Ultimately, the Archdiocese struck a curious compromise, closing the suburban escape hatch, but promptly opening another. Henceforth, schools throughout the diocese could admit any public school student—without examining his motives—so long as he filled an existing vacancy caused by another student’s transfer or dropout. Thus, Catholic schools could exploit busing to stabilize—though, in theory, not to increase—their enrollments. Indeed, during 1975–76, nearly 4,200 students moved from Boston’s public schools into the Catholic system (at least two-thirds of them apparent refugees from busing). Some schools took advantage of the situation to swell their enrollments, one such “haven” being Somerville’s Little Flower School, which accepted dozens of students from adjacent Charlestown. Openly defying the Cardinal, Monsignor John Hogan said he would admit any Townie kid who applied, a stand which made him an overnight hero in Charlestown. As he marched in the Bunker Hill Day parade that June, parents rushed from the sidewalk to wring his hands in gratitude.

When evidence of such abuses surfaced in the fall of 1975, Medeiros announced that any priest or nun who had knowingly violated his policy would be “disciplined.” Later that winter, the Archdiocese wrote to twenty-two schools, demanding an explanation for their suddenly inflated enrollments. That was the extent of the “discipline.” Explaining the Cardinal’s inaction, his aides noted that priests and Sisters enjoyed “substantial autonomy” in running their schools and, in any case, a rebellious pastor could only be removed through a rare and “unseemly” canonical trial.

By then, Medeiros was loath to challenge the traditional Irish ethos prevailing in most old-line parishes. He had felt the muscle of the anti-busing movement and it frightened him. Three emissaries from ROAR had called on him, imploring him to intervene on their behalf with Judge Garrity. When the Cardinal declined, ROAR launched demonstrations outside his house, with protesters brandishing placards reading: “Why does the Cardinal hate white children?” and “O Lord, why hast thou forsaken me?” Such activists were only a tiny fragment of the city’s Catholics, but their presence outside his window seems to have awakened the Cardinal’s old anxieties about the aggressive
Irish. More and more, he retreated behind the Chancery walls, ceding his responsibilities in this area to others.

Characteristically, he let different priests speak to different constituencies. His conservative “urban coordinator,” Father Paul Donovan, became the Cardinal’s ambassador to the alienated Irish, meeting with Louise Day Hicks and her lieutenants, reassuring them that the Church wasn’t their enemy. Later, Auxiliary Bishop Joseph Ruocco—a moderate, but the only Italian in the hierarchy and therefore something of an outsider—headed a committee to mobilize the clergy behind law and order. And a liberal, Father Michael Groden, was loaned to Arthur Garrity as staff director of the Citywide Coordinating Council, the judge’s watchdog agency.

The Cardinal still spoke out from time to time—occasionally with surprising passion—but he rarely followed through on his pronouncements. “I’m not a judge,” he would say. “I have no coercive powers…. All I can do is preach it, proclaim it, and let those who have ears to hear, hear. I can’t crack your head and stick the Book in there.” When critics questioned this narrow view of his authority, he asked gloomily, “What can I do? The more I say, the worse it gets.”

This incapacity spread to other areas. For a decade the Archdiocese had built low- and moderate-income housing on Church-owned land in the suburbs. Hundreds of units were already occupied in Beverly, Lexington, and North Andover, but in the affluent South Shore town of Scituate—on “the Irish Riviera”—parishioners of St. Mary’s of the Nativity Church blocked the development in a bitter court battle. When the Archdiocese finally prevailed in the Supreme Court, Medeiros surprisingly agreed to let eight parishioners sue him before the Church’s own tribunal, normally restricted to marriage cases. After prolonged hearings, the three-priest panel ruled that the parish had not been adequately consulted. Ballots were distributed after Mass one Sunday and the parish voted overwhelmingly against the project (prompting one priest to remark bitterly, “At the Church of the Nativity there is still no room at the inn”). Ultimately Medeiros found another site in Scituate, but the surrender raised new doubts about his leadership.

Unfortunately for the Cardinal, his diffidence lent itself to satire. The most wicked foray in this genre was an article in
Boston Magazine
, consisting entirely of aphorisms, riddles, and parables:

“How can you tell Cardinal Medeiros from a marshmallow?” “He is the one without the corners.”

“Why does Cardinal Medeiros carry pudding in his wallet?” “For identification.”

Nobody at the magazine had anticipated what was to follow. After the
Pilot
and a popular radio priest denounced the “scurrilous” piece, hundreds of protest letters poured in, advertisers withdrew their ads, the magazine fired its editor, and the author—an Irish Catholic columnist for the
Herald American
—was dismissed by his newspaper. But all this may have been less a rallying
around the Cardinal himself than an old Boston Irish reflex toward any slight to their Church.

One of Medeiros’ liabilities was the massive debt he had inherited from his predecessor. Cushing had been a splendid benefactor, showering Boston’s Catholics with schools, hospitals, colleges, and a dazzling array of human services. Not only was Medeiros unable to continue this largesse, he had to take some of it away, a practice not calculated to win him any friends. When he entered office, the debt had reached $42 million. Medeiros was uncomfortable raising money, temperamentally disinclined to put the bite on wealthy communicants, so in May 1971 he launched a bureaucratic substitute, the Archbishop’s Stewardship Appeal. Reminding the faithful that “in this world we are only the stewards of the good things with which we are blessed,” he assessed each parish a portion of the $7.2 million target. Its first year, the drive fell a million dollars short. By 1974, when the anti-busing movement organized a boycott, it produced only $5.1 million, and later did only slightly better. Determined to reduce the debt, the Cardinal had no alternative but to pare spending sharply. Between 1970 and 1977, he cut the budget by 40 percent, closed facilities, and curtailed activities of the Archdiocese’s forty-three agencies. By 1977, the debt was down to a manageable $15 million, but clergy and parishioners alike bristled at the new austerity.

His social gospel stymied by Irish intransigence, his temporal programs crimped by budgetary restraints, the Cardinal increasingly devoted his energies to the defense of theological orthodoxy. Even before leaving Brownsville, he told an interviewer he supported the Pope “150 percent” on such critical questions as birth control, abortion, divorce, and clerical celibacy. And barely a month after reaching Boston, he bitterly excoriated the pro-abortion movement as “the new barbarism” which was “moving ruthlessly to upset the moral order established by God.”

When Protestants, Jews, and Catholic liberals voiced dismay at the Cardinal’s vehemence, Medeiros only intensified his campaign, labeling abortion “the murder of the innocents,” ordering anti-abortion messages read from the pulpits of every parish, asking the faithful to sign “pro-life” pledges. In 1977, he mustered the Church’s waning political influence to pass a bill banning the use of Medicaid funds for abortions in Massachusetts. Several years later, he helped force the political retirement of Congressman Robert Drinan, a Jesuit priest who had supported liberalized abortion laws. Then, five days before the election of Drinan’s successor, Medeiros released a pastoral letter aimed at defeating Barney Frank, Kevin White’s former majordomo, whom Drinan was actively backing. “Those who make abortions possible by law—such as legislators and those who promote, defend, and elect these same lawmakers—cannot separate themselves from that guilt which accompanies this horrendous crime,” the Cardinal wrote. “It is imperative that Catholics realize the law of God extends into the polling booth.” But the voters—about 40 percent of them Catholics—went decisively for Frank, prompting some commentators to wonder whether the Cardinal hadn’t overstepped himself.

Medeiros showed little interest in the verdict of the Fourth Congressional District. On such matters, he had a constituency of one—the Pope. “I abide by the rules of the Church,” he would say. “Those rules come from God and the Holy Father.” A stickler for clerical tradition, Medeiros was rarely seen without his formal regalia—the crimson-edged black cassock, wide crimson sash, red skullcap, and ornate pectoral cross on a gold chain. While many Cardinals discouraged the formal address “Your Eminence” and kissing of the episcopal ring, Medeiros appreciated such acts of deference. His style was rarely authoritarian, but associates sometimes felt cold steel beneath his gentle piety. Once, speaking of a recalcitrant monsignor, he said, “The Jesus in me loves the Jesus in him, but frankly I don’t much care for the rest of him.” And there is the story of a young priest who had served as part-time speechwriter to Cushing and stayed on in the episcopal residence hoping to fill the same function for Medeiros. Each morning he came down to breakfast and looked hopefully at the new Archbishop, who didn’t know what to do with him. If such a problem had confronted Cushing, the old Cardinal might have growled, “Father, get your ass out of here!” One morning, Medeiros said, “Father, I spoke with Jesus last night. Jesus needs you in Cohasset.”

He could be tough indeed on those who violated his idea of clerical discipline. When no priest appeared to celebrate Mass at Boston University’s Catholic Center in March 1974, Sister Gloria Fitzgerald conducted a “service of Christian community.” Medeiros interpreted this as an attempt by an unordained person to celebrate Mass and forced Sister Gloria’s resignation as co-chaplain. Father Paul Shanley, a “street priest,” had worked with Boston’s gay community for several years, but in 1979 Medeiros denounced homosexuality as a “serious depravity” and told Father Shanley to find himself another job. Father Richard P. McBrien, a professor of theology at Boston College, had opposed the Vatican’s positions on birth control, clerical celibacy, and ordination of women. In a confrontation, the Cardinal demanded that he stop attacking the Pope. Hardly a radical—he is now chairman of the Theology Department at Notre Dame—McBrien found Medeiros’ position inexplicable. Medeiros ordered the
Pilot
to cancel McBrien’s syndicated column.

Though the Cardinal could still enforce his will within the Church, he was ill at ease in the secular realm, particularly dealing with public officials or politicians. “Politics is a noble science,” he once declared, “the trouble is with those who abuse the science.” In fact, Medeiros profoundly distrusted political entanglements. No longer did politicians care very much what “Lake Street” thought. In the old days, when the Mayor or Governor wanted to consult the Cardinal, they went to him; now he called on them. On the few occasions when Kevin White and Medeiros met at City Hall, they seemed to be talking different languages. “The Cardinal pontificated in his High Cathedral Prose, the Mayor muttered in his Ward Five Vernacular, and never the twain did meet,” reported an eyewitness to one encounter.

Only once did the Mayor actually solicit Medeiros’ help, seeking the Church’s support on a tax referendum. All he got in return was a pious lecture
from Medeiros about the “two spheres” of church and state. Afterwards, White drove to an aide’s house, downed two glasses of wine, and, pounding the table, shouted, “The bastards! The bastards!”

By the late seventies, the Cardinal felt unwelcome not only at City Hall but in many Boston neighborhoods. “I know I have hurt many people in this city,” he said. “I did not intend to hurt them, but they’ve taken what I said as being against them.” Increasingly, he shunned the city whenever he could, spending weeks on end in Alaska, Japan, Korea, the Philippines, Poland, Italy, and the Azores. “I’m not only Bishop of Boston, you know,” he told one priest, “I’m a prince of the Church, and therefore I have responsibilities for the whole world.” Sometimes he sought solace in Fall River, eating boiled clams in his brother’s ample backyard, fishing with a handline off the rocks in nearby Newport. But, along with diabetes and high blood pressure, he suffered from increasingly dark depressions. “Years ago,” he told friends, “I used to jump out of bed every morning, eager to get started on the day. Now I get up and think: O Lord, I wish I could hide under a tree on the top of a mountain!”