The children arriving at Blessed Sacrament School in North Lawndale, giggling and goofing around, knew immediately that something important had happened.
Bundled lumps of mittened energy watching their breath turn to fog, the youngsters entered the main hallway Thursday morning, but all was dark. And quiet as a church.
Clutching daddy’s hand, they wondered in big, audible whispers–what was going on?
The only light was the unreliable flicker of a single red candle on a table in the hall, and soon the children knew the news. On the table with the candle, they spotted a framed photograph of Cardinal Joseph Bernardin.
Throughout the day, pairs of students in blue and white uniforms took turns in a silent vigil, watching over the tiny makeshift shrine.
You could almost call it a miracle: quiet in the hallway of a busy, bustling grade school.
Nearby, principal Sabrina Roy clutched a tissue and said softly, “He was just a strong supporter of Catholic schools, especially in the inner city. He just believed in Catholic education for all children.”
Cardinal Joseph Bernardin talked to presidents and potentates. He communed with God. But sometimes it is the smallest moments, the quiet footnotes that tell the most.
The patience of listening, a lit candle, a gentle touch, an unexpected Christmas phone call, silence where there had been raucous noise.
These are the grace notes of a life that will be long-remembered:
There was education-made-flesh at St. Sabina Academy on the South Side, where first graders in Colette Flynn’s class were talking about the cardinal’s death, and death in general.
“He’s an angel now and he’s watching over us,” she told the children, amusing themselves by poking their tongues into the holes left behind when a tooth or two fell out.
“Do any of you have a relative up with God?” Flynn asked the class.
Every kid had a hand in the air.
“I’ve got two there,” trumped Darry Wilson, 6.
“Is the cardinal sick any more?” the teacher asked.
“No,” they said.
Then this epitaph from Charles Jackson, 6, standing near a wall covered with construction paper owls: “He’s happy and he’s in our hearts.”
A divine sense of humor
Those who knew Bernardin speak of his approachability, hail his humanity. What is not so widely known was here was a guy with a sense of humor.
Maynard Wishner, past president of the Jewish Federation of Chicago, traveled to Israel with the cardinal in March 1995 as part of the first official Catholic-Jewish delegation visit to the Holy Land.
During their meeting with Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat, the PLO leader kept calling the cardinal, “Your Holiness.”
After their meeting, Bernardin poked Wisher in the ribs, eyes twinkling: “I just got a promotion in there,” Bernardin said.
In the world of Catholic protocol, only one man on earth is called “Your Holiness.” That would be the pope.
Churches, united under God
Seven fancy church steeples poke into the sky above southwest suburban Lemont, a town of fewer than 11,000 souls along the Illinois and Michigan Canal.
This town dominated by steeples seemed dominated by sadness, too, on Thursday as the people of Lemont learned that the cardinal had died.
Joseph Ricken 52, stood outside St. Alphonsus Church, a red brick building 130 years old where he had bowed his head in a well-worn wooden pew to pray for the cardinal.
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Twirling like a compass, Ricken pointed here, then here: “There’s a German Catholic church over there and a Polish church over there, and an Irish Catholic Church down the hill.
“He taught us to be one community and not to think about our ethnic divisions.”
A personal touch
Patty Crowley, 83, has long disagreed with the teachings of the Catholic Church on the issue of birth control. She and her late husband were part of the Christian Family Movement, a grass-roots social justice group, and in 1964, they were asked to be part of a Papal Birth Control Commission.
The Crowleys, and others on the commission, viewed the issue one way. The pope disagreed.
Years later, when Bernardin took over from the more conservative and traditional Cardinal John Cody, he invited those who had been hurt or offended by the church to write to him.
Crowley took him up on it.
But Bernardin sent a form letter in reply. That was in 1982 and she felt offended all over again.
Nearly 15 years later–just this past January–out of nowhere came a call from Bernardin. Could he come to her house to visit, he asked.
Crowley was stunned.”Sure.”
For an hour, over tea and cookies, Patty Crowley told him her story of a wound that had not fully healed in 32 years.
She was profoundly moved by the visit: “The fact that he came and listened, to me, was remarkable.”
A place on the mantel
On Thursday, another family photograph was added to those that crowded the altar at Providence of God Church in the largely Mexican neighborhood of Pilsen–that of their brother, Joseph.
It is a tradition that has followed the parishioners from Mexico to the West Side of Chicago where, during November, photos of the deceased are propped amid the votive candles, for special remembrance and prayers.
With patterns of red and blue from the stained glass shining on their sad faces, two dozen prayerful members of the church’s senior citizens club listened as Rev. Robert Perez remembered Bernardin at mass Thursday morning at the church.
“He has helped us look at the ways death can be a friend,” said Perez. “In this case he has befriended death. He has not made death such an enemy.”
Showing us how to die, that is one of the lessons of Bernardin’s battle with cancer.
In city and suburbs, from Catholics and those of other faiths, the words rang out over and over, that the cardinal–through his own public dying–had taught them lessons of reacting to their own mortality.
Charline Aycock learned of the cardinal’s death as she awakened–for no reason–in the early hours of Thursday and heard the news on the radio at 3 a.m. Earlier, she had attended the opening of a music club.
“I was lying there listening to all his friends saying all these great things about him and I felt so comforted,” said Aycock, who practices no formal religion.
“It was such a contrast to come back from the opening of the House of Blues. As I stayed there (in bed) listening, it occurred to me what is really important. . . “
“I think he removed some of the fear of death,” she said. “I think he made the path easier for us.”
Lessons for the living
But if Bernardin showed us the way to die, he showed us how to live, too.
At the Loyola medical complex where the cancer center was recently named in his honor in west suburban Maywood, Bernardin was remembered at the daily mass.
Hospital patient Janet DiVecchio of Joliet, recovering from hip replacement surgery sat quietly in her wheelchair in the back of the chapel.
A nurse herself at University of Illinois medical center, DiVecchio said, “I know I’ve learned patience from him. I’ve learned to look at humanity a little differently and I hope to bring some of that to my job.”
A word of caution. A reminder from Rev. William O’Shea of Naperville’s St. Margaret Mary Church not to forget the lessons the cardinal taught. “His openness about death helped us illuminate the mystery of our own existence. I think he helped people deal with their own illnesses, their own losses,” he said. “But we need to share the reality of our lives. When we stop being private, we become more human.”
Lending help, sharing hope
There were favors, large and small, efforts great and greater during his 14 years in Chicago. Bernardin “tried to do the impossible,” said Rev. Ted Stone.
Stone ought to know. In 1971, with church sanction, Stone left the priesthood to marry. Ten years later, Stone’s wife committed suicide and he was left to raise his two small children, ages 5 and 7, one of them handicapped.
In 1984, Stone asked for Bernardin’s help to be reinstated as an active priest. Over many years, the cardinal interceded repeatedly with the Rome church officials for Stone’s reinstatement.
“He kept going back and back, trying to get the authorities to allow it.”
After seven years they agreed. During that long and difficult time, said Stone, “He always radiated such hope himself . . . that I never had a bitter moment. His hope was contagious.”
Today, with great thanks to the efforts of Joseph Bernardin, Stone is pastor of Mary, Seat of Wisdom, Park Ridge.
Gentle, even in private
“I’m not a very religious person. I’m a lawyer,” said John O’Malley, by way of explaining that when he took on Bernardin as a client, he wasn’t prepared for what he got: A man every bit as honest and decent in private as he seemed on TV.
O’Malley and attorney Jim Serritella worked on the cardinal’s legal defense after Steven Cook accused him of sexually abusing him as a teenager in Cincinnati in the 1970s. Cook recanted the charges and Bernardin ministered to him before Cook died of AIDS.
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After days of rumors in a media feeding frenzy over the Cook charges, O’Malley was with Bernardin when he took his first look at the accusations listed in Cook’s court filing.
“The man you saw on TV, the man of integrity, the gentle man . . . is the person we saw and dealt with in person,” said Serritella.
A man for all people
To hear members of his flock speak, Bernardin seemed to have touched every corner of the archdiocese. Almost everyone, it seems, has a personal story to tell of their time with the cardinal.
Sister Joseph Marie Zenda, president of a retirement community run by the Franciscan Sisters of Chicago in Lemont, remembers the cardinal’s habit of touching a person’s hand or arm when he spoke with them.
“You felt as if he was talking to you and only you,” Zenda said.
For Buddy Bulow, father of four young boys, it was the voice at the other end of the phone. Bulow was dying from cancer at home in Orland Park, the phone rang and Buddy’s wife answered and handed him the phone.
“Buddy’s whispering to us it’s the cardinal. We started laughing, thinking he had too much medicine in him,” his wife said.
But it was the cardinal, said his wife, Kathy.
“He called three or four times.” It was comforting to my husband just to think he would be praying for him.”
“Just to have somebody like him, somebody important like him take the time to do what he did. He even called Christmas night just to wish him a Merry Christmas.
“And my husband passed away Jan. 15.”