A new video arrived this week, with a most unlikely star.
He speaks with a slow, sometimes halting cadence. He enunciates each syllable and measures punctuation with great care, as if rushing the words out of his mouth might damage them.
He avoids any of the familiarity or jocularity that video cameras love, and the script he delivers is hardly a stemwinder.
Mostly he sits stock still, in a black suit, on a red chair. Occasionally, with apparent effort, he leans forward a few inches to emphasize a point. His neck protrudes from a Roman collar that by this time looks several sizes too large.
In short, if this were his screen test, he would fail.
But the same qualities that made Cardinal Joseph Bernardin such an unlikely darling of this or any other medium bring with them a flood of memories.
The video is “Open Hearts, Open Minds, Open Doors,” a 15-minute pep talk about making people with disabilities welcome in the church, produced by the Pathways Awareness Foundation. Aside from a few news clips, it marks the last footage taken of the cardinal before his death, the first anniversary of which is Friday.
The video’s completion and distribution, almost a year after his death, offers strangely intimate reminders of what it was like to be in a room with Bernardin, to speak with him.
It is an axiom of old age and a familiar theme of eulogies that career achievements and worldly glory fade quickly, while memories of family, friendship and personal qualities live on.
If anybody doubts that, they need look no further than the remembrances of Bernardin this week.
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There have been no great retrospectives on the 1983 bishops’ letter on nuclear war, which Bernardin wrote and sold to his fellow American bishops. I haven’t seen any discussion of the unpopular stand he took in 1990 to stave off financial disaster in the Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago, or of the intriguing behind-the-scenes role he had in the Vatican’s dealings with Archbishop Raymond Hunthausen of Seattle in the mid-1980s.
Instead it has been a weeklong string of personal anecdotes about the cardinal–meals shared, funny comments, gestures of kindness, poignant goodbyes.
If people of a certain generation remember where they were the moment they heard that John F. Kennedy died, the Bernardin analogue seems to be that everybody remembers exactly when and where they last saw the cardinal alive.
The demand for such stories seems great, and the supply seems even greater. In his last years, particularly, Bernardin reached out to a phenomenal number of people. In parish visits, hospital visits, yes, even the media ambushes that awaited him outside so many events, he always managed to find a moment here for one person, a moment there for another. The moments added up at a furious pace.
To listen to the tales this week, a newcomer might assume that Bernardin was a natural, the kind of supercharged personality that is born for the student council presidency and goes on to greatness in sales or politics, feeding on human contact.
What seems to be lost in most of this week’s reminiscences is that Bernardin was quite the opposite. He was quiet and rather formal in demeanor, publicly and privately. He was not given to pithy or fiery speech.
Earlier in his career, friends have said, Bernardin was more comfortable with a briefcase full of papers than a room full of people.
That makes his lasting impression as kind, concerned, loving leader–his pastoral gifts, in the language of the church–all the more remarkable. Whether it was inspiration, willpower or some combination of the two, he managed to overcome personality and leave behind memories of the person.
Even in a short video like “Open Hearts,” that comes across. Some people have suggested that it was in his eyes, that what shyness and demeanor held back, the eyes gave away.
I don’t know about that. But I will say that if you look at the video closely, in the midst of his sober narration, you can see him wink.
Carrying the name: On Thursday the Catholic Theological Union named the first five Bernardin Scholars–graduate students coming to Hyde Park from as far as the Virgin Islands and Ghana to study Catholic theology. Along with their scholarships, each was presented with a copy of Bernardin’s book, “The Gift of Peace,” by the cardinal’s sister, Elaine Addison.
For one of the scholars, Jeremy Langford, that put a great day over the top. Langford, after all, was the 26-year-old acquisitions editor who helped bring “The Gift of Peace” to Loyola Press last fall and worked to get the last revisions made during the cardinal’s final weeks. Langford has said that working on the book changed his life and helped him decide to dive back into the study of his faith.