Each day now his energy wanes a bit more, even as the demands on his time grow. But whenever he can, Cardinal Joseph Bernardin goes off to the quiet of the private study in his Gothic-style mansion on North State Parkway.
There, in a single sitting, he recently read “Our Greatest Gift: A Meditation on Dying and Caring,” by Henri Nouwen, a distinguished Catholic theologian.
Nouwen, a friend of Bernardin’s for a quarter of a century, had presented the book to the cardinal in 1995, while Bernardin was lying in Loyola Medical Center, recovering from his cancer surgery.
When the cardinal returned to the book three weeks ago, Nouwen’s words had taken on a new immediacy. Bernardin’s cancer had returned, this time in terminal form; Nouwen had died of a heart attack on Sept. 21.
“I have to say to you that intellectually and as a person of faith, I saw death as a central part of life,” Bernardin said in a conversation Friday morning. “But I never really reflected on it in terms of myself. I would say, `That’s far off. When I get older and retire, I’ll start thinking about death, but I’m too busy now.’ “
In recent weeks, Bernardin has also been doing a little writing of his own, an as-yet-untitled project he hopes to finish in four to six weeks.
“It’s a little book, a booklet really, about 100 small pages,” Bernardin said. “I’m simply writing from the heart and, of course, from the head. I’m simply putting into writing what I have shared verbally with many people in recent weeks.”
What he has been thinking and talking and writing about is death. His own death. The death of fellow cancer patients. The death of Jesus Christ and how that has influenced the world for 2,000 years.
Now, even as he sorts his own thoughts and feelings, Bernardin has asked his “family”–Catholics, Chicagoans, whoever hears his message–to walk with him in last months of earthly life.
By focusing the high-tech lights of the modern world on the most ancient traditions of the Roman Catholic Church, Chicago’s cardinal has thrust death center stage.
“All my life I have been teaching people how to live, and I thought, if I could teach them how to die, that would be important,” the cardinal said.
In a world that has produced a jumble of images of death, Bernardin has asked people to understand his own dying in a more coherent context: the Judeo-Christian framework.
Death, according to that tradition, is not an end but a doorway to God’s world–a friend, as Bernardin says.
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That may sound radical to modern ears, especially in a youth-oriented American culture that often views death as a clinical, perplexing event.
“By pushing death away from us, we only heighten our fear of it,” said Rabbi Maurice Lamb, a professor at Yeshiva University in New York and author of “The Jewish Way of Death and Dying.”
“Cardinal Bernardin is doing a wonderful thing in refamiliarizing people with death. He is helping to remove the mystery and thereby remove the taboo,” Lamb said.
However varied his duties as archbishop, Bernardin has always considered himself first and foremost a pastor. And so it is with a certain logic that he has chosen to use his own death as the occasion to offer one final lesson to his flock.
“It’s as old as the Gospel itself,” he said.
On reflection, he finds that the full impact of that biblical lesson did not strike him until his cancer returned and his doctors gave him less than a year to live.
“Personally, I was always fearful of death. When, all of a sudden, I was faced with it, I was very much at peace,” he said. And even as his body begins to deteriorate, that peace grows.
“As I get closer to death, the more prepared I feel, the more comfortable I feel,” he said. “I intend to live my life day to day. I don’t have any big things I’ve got to finish before I go, and that is a very peaceful feeling.”
Inside and outside the church, religious leaders say that Bernardin has already accomplished a part of his mission, simply by talking frankly about his experience.
“Cardinal Bernardin has put a name on the reality of death,” said Martin Marty, a distinguished Protestant theologian and professor at the University of Chicago.
“He has become a symbol of hope, even though he’s going to die,” said Rev. Michael Place, research theologian for the Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago. “That really is the ultimate Christian message–you can die and still hope.”
Part of the Christian message, that death is followed by an afterlife–heaven–is familiar to anybody who has passed through Sunday school.
How we let go of our earthly lives is a far more difficult and less familiar lesson.
Nouwen, the departed friend whom Bernardin frequently cites in his discussion of “death as a friend,” wrote, “Our death may be the end of our success, our productivity, our fame or our importance among people, but it is not the end of our fruitfulness.”
But, Nouwen continued, “Dying is not a sweet, sentimental event; it is a great struggle to surrender ourselves completely. This surrender is not an obvious human response. To the contrary: we want to cling to whatever is left.”
Christian theology has always taught that an incomparable reward lies at the end of that struggle. Medieval theologians were so confident of heaven that they plotted out exquisitely detailed floor plans of that great beyond.
In times of catastrophe, believers embraced death fervently. Even as the Black Plague of the 14th Century was killing a third of Europe’s population, parishioners in Colmar, France, celebrating their imminent end, painted the sores of the plague on the image of Christ hanging above their altar.
Death was also, throughout western civilization, the fulcrum of morality. Human actions have consequences beyond our mortal lives, preachers taught, separating the good from the evil in the afterlife.
That concept was as central to the Jews of the 2nd Century B.C. as it was to the fathers of the Christian church.
As modernism broke through religious tradition, philosophers turned the question on its head: If death is the end of all existence, then why worry how good or bad we are?
That question is particularly difficult to answer in a culture which, as the late Arnold Toynbee observed, now orbits around the twin gods of materialism and individualism.
“`Death’ itself has become almost unmentionable in the West–particularly in the United States,” wrote Toynbee, one of the 20th Century’s greatest historians. “Death is `un-American.’ “
Yet there are signs that Americans are increasingly trying to grapple with the issues surrounding death.
Books on death, such as “How We Die,” have become runaway bestsellers. Hospices, born in the 1970s out of a need to humanize death, have become a common alternative to dying in the high-tech, impersonal setting of a hospital.
The “right to die” has become a perennial issue before the U.S. Supreme Court. On the other end of the intellectual spectrum, the 1980s video series, “Faces of Death,” became a cult favorite, simply by letting people peek at what appeared to be crude images of actual corpses.
Against that backdrop, Bernardin’s invitation to examine death has riveted the attention of people not only in Chicago but across the nation. Reporters and television crews have followed the cardinal’s every move since his announcement.
Again, the words of Nouwen have taken life in Bernardin’s work: “Befriending our own death and helping others to befriend theirs are inseparable.”
Bernardin freely acknowledges that he is gaining as much by sharing his last few months as he gives to others.
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And though he cannot sketch out any pictures of what lies beyond, Bernardin says that he presently stands near the moment when analysis must end, and belief takes over.
“That doesn’t mean there’s not a certain sadness in leaving your friends. There is a sadness in saying goodbye, in knowing that each visit might be the last, even though we’ll be together in the next life,” he said.
“But my mind and my will are shaped by faith.”