Greg Daly“America’s Church will most need prominent voices seen as champions of immigrants and the poor…” writes Greg Daly
“I expect to die in bed, my successor will die in prison and his successor will die a martyr in the public square,” Chicago’s late Cardinal Francis George said some years ago, continuing, “his successor will pick up the shards of a ruined society and slowly help rebuild civilisation, as the Church has done so often in human history.”
Those at the more reactionary end of the Church’s spectrum have in recent years been inclined to doubt the late cardinal’s prophetic powers. While they have shared his suspicions about the threats to peace and justice posed by “the nation state gone bad”, they have tended to view his successor with contempt, seeing him as a compromiser who would never risk anything for the truth the Church teaches.
Whether Chicago’s Archbishop Blase Cupich deserves such condemnation is open to question. It seems he permanently dirtied his bib with some when, while bishop of Spokane, Washington, he sought to discourage clergy from participating in demonstrations or vigils outside abortion clinics; many concluded that rather than being wary about the wisdom of certain tactics he was, quite simply, ‘soft’ on abortion.
It was entirely predictable, then, that one website responded with disgust last month to the news that Dr Cupich, along with Indianapolis’s Archbishop Joseph Tobin and Dallas’s Archbishop Kevin Farrell, was to become a cardinal. “In ‘seismic shift’ Pope appoints very liberal Cupich and two more US progressives among 17 new cardinals,” it declared, claiming “the move is alarming pro-life, pro-family, and tradition-minded Catholics because of Cupich’s record as an extremely liberal bishop”.
While none of the three is ‘liberal’ by secular standards, less hysterical voices observed, they are all perceived as belonging to the American hierarchy’s ‘social justice’ wing, unlike other prelates such as Philadelphia’s Archbishop Charles Chaput or New York’s Cardinal Timothy Dolan, who are popularly linked with the ‘culture wars’ of recent decades.
Gun control
During his years in Dallas, for instance, the Dublin-born Dr Farrell has emerged as a prominent advocate for gun control, as well as on immigration issues, while Dr Tobin publicly clashed with his state’s governor Mike Pence over his determination to welcome Syrian refugees in Indianapolis despite the governor’s objections.
Now set to become Newark, New Jersey’s first ever cardinal, Archbishop Tobin will be rather closer to America’s seat of power than he was in the backwater of Indianapolis, while Mike Pence, of course, is now US vice-president-elect, expected by many to be responsible for the lion’s share of governing when Donald Trump is inaugurated president in January.
With Mr Pence’s opposition to abortion well known, and his views on homosexuality seemingly going rather beyond that of the Church, it seems fair to say that the American Church requires no more bishops seen – fairly or otherwise – as culture warriors.
Instead, with a Republican Congress and a president who rode to power on a platform defined by racism and misogyny, it seems likely that in the coming years America’s Church will most need prominent voices seen as champions of immigrants and the poor, as willing to fight against the death penalty as for gun control and environmental protection.
Pope Francis may just have picked exactly the prelates the US needs, and with a rebalanced hierarchy as conspicuously countercultural in the time of Trump as it was in the Obama era, Cardinal George’s prophecy may yet come true.
One to watch
Those of us who missed Strange Occurrences in a Small Irish Village when it ran in cinemas during August and September now have a chance to rectify that omission.
The film about the phenomenon of Knock shrine is newly released on DVD, and comes with the kind of praise one would expect for any film from the team that brought us One Million Dubliners, the enthralling and heartbreaking 2014 documentary about Glasnevin Cemetery.
I was one of those who missed the film during its cinema run, flying as I was to Cardinal-elect Cupich’s Chicago just as the film was opening, so I’ll definitely be looking forward to catching up on this important study of an element in Irish life that to many is utterly central, and to others profoundly exotic.
* * *
Writing in the Irish Independent this week, Eamonn Sweeney comments that most of us absorb a picture of American life that conceals "why someone might vote Republican, let alone Trump". Sport, he says, is one exception to this picture, with there being an "omnipresence of religious faith and feeling" in American sports.
Dr Cupich's Chicago may be a Democrat stronghold, but it was striking to read just week's ago, ahead of the Chicago Cubs winning their first baseball World Series since 1908, how team chaplain Fr Burke Masters says Mass in section 209 of the iconic Wrigley Field stadium before every Cubs game.