In the hush of a cathedral, at the front of a line more than 1,000 people long, a hand reached out and touched the white fabric that draped over the foot of a cherry wood casket.
A woman prayed for consolation for the recent losses of her son and her husband.
A sister squeezed her dead brother’s hand, the beads of a rosary entwined in his ashen fingers.
The first day of the round-the- clock, 42-hour wake for Cardinal Joseph Bernardin was a massive public spectacle complete with motorcades, crowd-control cattle gates and television helicopters whirring overhead.
But it was, to a much greater degree, a collection of intimate and private moments, of individual hearts drawn out on a chilly afternoon to say their good-byes.
After a private service Monday for close friends and relatives at his mansion, the cardinal’s body was driven to Holy Name Cathedral to lie in state before a procession of people, most of whom he had never met, people who stood in line for hours with rosaries dangling from red fingers, single roses clutched in their mittens.
Two boys ditched their field trip to Water Tower Place and hustled the few blocks to the cathedral to pay their respects.
A woman stood in line, thinking about her cancer, filled with admiration for the way Bernardin faced death.
Over the course of the afternoon and evening, thousands filed into the cathedral, past a gantlet of 20 guest books, and up the long, wide aisle to the casket, his body 10 paces in front of the massive stone altar.
The body was dressed in a white chasuble with gold trim and a matching mitre, gifts last year from his cabinet. He wore glasses, and his gold bishop’s ring, big as a postage stamp, was laced with filigree.
He was flanked by a few modest flower arrangements of orange lilies, chrysanthemums, ferns and ivy. Send no flowers, the cardinal had said; instead, donate the money to charity.
Overhead, in the highest shadows of the vaulted cathedral, dangled the galeros–red wide-brimmed, ritualistic hats–of past cardinals. His, too, will be raised there to hang for decade upon decade.
Waiting in line for up to five hours, the mourners talked in English, Polish, Spanish, Korean.
The conversation between a mother and her 6-year-old daughter summed it up. Held in her mother’s arms as they stood behind the crowd-control cattle gates, Hillary Lunkes wanted to know what they were going to do.
“We’re going to see the body of the cardinal and pay our respects,” her mother, Kay, said matter-of-factly. Her parents had brought her here in 1965 for the visitation of Cardinal Albert Meyer.
“He (Bernardin) had cancer,” her mother told her. “He’s going to heaven as a reward for a good life.”
It was that good life that drew the mourners to the procession and the visitation. The line for the 3 p.m. visitation began forming at about 10 a.m. when a carload of women from Indiana took their place on the sidewalk. Charlene Novinc, 48, took out her crystal rosary, a gift from a friend who traveled to Italy in 1967, and began praying.
The procession to Holy Name began hours later at 1:38 p.m. when pallbearers gingerly returned the casket from the mansion to the hearse. Nearly 600 people had gathered–standing with dogs, beside bicycles, on the wheels of in-line skates and behind strollers.
The soft, clear chiming of bells swung by children and adults from St. Juliana Catholic Church on the Northwest Side rang out as Bernardin’s procession rolled south along State Parkway.
With police on motorcycles in front and on horseback in back, the cortege of the hearse, five limousines and three police cars moved at a jogger’s pace toward the cathedral.
Along the 15-block route, maids stepped into the street from exclusive homes. A man in a brownstone opened his window and trained a video camera on the procession. Other men along the route removed their caps and covered their hearts. Some people wept.
Many made the sign of the cross or clasped their hands in prayer, their mouths quietly working.
The bellringers tried to keep up, but eventually had to let the procession, which was running late, pull away from them.
An elderly woman carrying two shopping bags tried to keep up, too, jogging for a few blocks before falling behind.
The hearse rolled along State Street past the Burritoville restaurant, where the sign, which usually has a message about the Bulls, simply said: “Rest in Peace.”
Two blocks south, the procession cleared out a bar called Trotter’s. “I looked around to see if anyone needed a drink and no one was there,” said bartender Patty O’Shea. “Everybody was outside.”
Passing groceries and peep shows, diners and print shops, a law school and a coffee shop, the procession took about 17 minutes to travel from the mansion to Holy Name Cathedral.
The route had been swept clean by an army of Streets and Sanitation workers with brooms and shovels.
“We don’t want the cardinal’s body to pass no dirty street,” said Lester Sams, a worker with the city department.
At the cathedral, the casket was taken from the hearse and carried up the stone steps, then disappeared behind the bronze doors.
On the street, people began to talk again. Some wiped their eyes.
For each, there was unique and compelling motivation for coming that nearly always translated into a common statement: I had to come.
For Charlene Alexander, the motivation was this.
Ten years ago when she was 18, she was diagnosed with precancerous growths. A relative brought her to talk to Bernardin, who was gentle and helpful.
In later years, Alexander had always wanted to get back to him to thank him for the kindness and tell him that she had beaten the illness.
As the black and silver hearse rolled up Monday, she folded her hands, raised them to her chest and silently ran through the Lord’s Prayer. Then, as tears streamed down her wind-bitten cheeks, she prayed that God would take the cardinal into heaven.
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An hour and a half later as she approached the open casket and again closed her eyes in a moment of prayer–and again the tears streamed down–she silently said the things she had wanted to say to him before, then she moved along.
Troy Resetich, 14, and Scott Wollack, 15, had been on a field trip with their classmates from St. Bede Academy in Peru, Ill. They had seen the Degas exhibit at the Art Institute on Monday morning, then they had been taken to Water Tower Place.
They hatched a scheme, though. “Me and him, we have a lot of Catholic background,” Resetich said, “and we wanted to see the cardinal.”
So they bought a newspaper, found the hours of the visitation and hiked over.
“I know my grandparents would be happy that I am doing this,” Wollack said.
Taron Webb, 14, has an injured leg, so surely couldn’t be expected to go to his South Side school Monday. But he made it to the cathedral on crutches, hobbling on public transportation to take a place near the front of the line.
He is not Catholic, but a Baptist. He hopes some day to be a minister.
Surrounded by Catholics who were much older, he led them in a rousing prayer outside the cathedral.
“Touch us Lord,” he said, his breath blowing white in the cold morning air. “Let Father Bernardin’s love and strength shine down upon us.”
Bernice DeLuca stood with her friends near the front of the line. She had two reasons for coming. One, she admired the man and thought he deserved her respects.
The other was deeper.
In the last year, DeLuca, a 67-year-old who lives in senior citizen housing on the Northwest Side, has lost her husband and her son. She cries about that each day.
She put on three sweaters Monday morning, pulled her coat over them and began a three-bus journey to Holy Name.
“I want to look at his face,” she said, “and see if looking at him is going to help my grief.”
Amy Long, a 25-year-old bank analyst, left work 45 minutes early to attend the visitation. She said her co-workers were surprised she was going. “People were talking about their parents coming to pay respects, but not someone my age,” Long said.
“He showed people in their 20s and 30s that the church is important,” Long said as she waited in line about 20 minutes to get inside the cathedral.
Her mother, who lives in Michigan, suggested she wear black for the service, but Long said she chose to come in her work clothes because she figured Bernardin would have preferred it.
Also standing in line were Bim Ogbevre; her 9-year-old daughter, Casandra; and her 6-year-old son, Michael.
The family went through the line a second time at the children’s request. Stuffed in parkas and stocking hats, the children said they weren’t able to see the cardinal well enough the first time.
“I just wanted to see his face before he was buried,” said Bim Ogbevre, who emigrated from Nigeria 16 years ago and converted to Catholicism about five years ago. “I never got to see him when he was alive.”
Before the public visitation there had been a private rite of reception. When the cardinal’s body arrived at Holy Name Cathedral, it was greeted with the rustle of 1,200 mourners rising to their feet for the service.
Then the packed nave of the church went silent as the six auxiliary bishops of Chicago marched down an aisle to receive the body.
The body was blessed with holy water, then carried forward, where it was placed on a bier at the front of the nave. For the next 30 minutes, the people who work for the archdiocese prayed and sang over the simple wooden casket that was covered with a white cloth pall.
At the end of the ceremony, Bernardin’s sister, Elaine Addison, and his chief of staff, Sister Mary Brian Costello, turned back the pall. The pallbearers then gathered around as the top of the casket was lifted off.
One by one, family members, then close friends came by, each squeezing the cardinal’s hand. Then as a ceremonial guard moved in on each side of the bier, the long train of visitors–
expected to continue almost non-stop until Wednesday morning, began to move up the center aisle of the cathedral.
Hours earlier, Bernardin’s body had been carried from the Blake & Lamb Funeral Home on State Street back to the stately cardinal’s residence at 1555 N. State Pkwy. for a private wake for his relatives and closest friends.
He had loved the old Victorian mansion, a place of warmth and grace and serenity perched on the edge of Lincoln Park in the glow of sleek Gold Coast brownstones and high-rises.
Bernardin had spent his final days there, venturing out for the last time three weeks ago for a medical test and a visit to his mother at a North Side home for the elderly.
“It was a homecoming and a sendoff,” said Kevin Dowdle, a close friend and pallbearer. “It was a chance for him to come back to the house one last time and to be mourned by his immediate family and friends.”
At 10:52 a.m., when the hearse carrying the cardinal’s body rolled into the driveway, about 100 people dotted the sidewalks and parkways near the mansion.
The pallbearers–among them lawyer Philip Corboy, archdiocese lawyer James Serritella, a mansion worker and two of Bernardin’s nephews–were waiting at the main entrance on North Avenue, under a portico draped in the purple and white bunting.
The three-story red brick mansion was awash in flowers, including a large arrangement from President Clinton that was set just inside the main hallway.
The coffin was carried into a small chapel immediately west of the main foyer–the same place where Bernardin had celebrated mass each day. It is a small, but bright hall not much bigger than a typical living room and recently rehabbed in pastels and gold trim. On the walls are gold inlaid icons of angels, and behind the altar are statues of St. Joseph and the Blessed Virgin flanking a large cross.
Bernardin’s coffin was placed in the center of the chapel, in front of a vase of roses, and the lid was opened.
Bernardin’s sister; her husband, Jim; and their four children were ushered in for about 10 minutes before the others began filing through to extend condolences.
In all, about 60 mourners were in attendance, three times as many as could fit in the chapel at one time. Also in the group were archdiocesan staff, a rabbi and a Greek Orthodox bishop.
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After passing through the chapel, mourners sipped juice and coffee, swapped their favorite Bernardin stories, and talked of how much he meant to them and how much they would miss him.