Nevertheless, as a member of the powerful Congregation for the Bishops, Wright played a central role in selecting Cushing’s successor. He had private scores to settle; if he couldn’t have the job himself, he didn’t want one of his enemies to have it. Like Pope Paul, Wright regarded Cushing as a maverick, unreliable on such critical issues as Humanae Vitae. Along with other conservatives—among them Apostolic Delegate Raimondi and New York’s Terence Cardinal Cooke—he wanted Boston back in more orthodox hands. Humberto Medeiros was eminently safe in that regard.
Yet if conservatives found Medeiros convenient for their own reasons, so, ironically, did many liberals, who focused less on his theological orthodoxy than on his reputation as a social activist supporting Mexican farm workers in the Rio Grande Valley. Moreover, he was Portuguese, one of the Catholic nationalities long excluded from power in the American Church. For nearly a decade, the Vatican had been seeking to break up ethnic monopolies in American dioceses, and nowhere had one ethnic group dominated the Church so long and so thoroughly as in Boston. If O’Connell spoke for the lace-curtain Irish and Cushing for the Irish working class, so Boston’s dissident priests and laymen hoped Medeiros would be Archbishop of the dispossessed non-Irish. Father Tom Corrigan, a founder of the Association of Boston Urban Priests, welcomed him as “a unique and exciting choice.” The Catholic Interracial Council said Medeiros gave “every indication of being a spiritual leader of distinction.”
But Cushing himself wasn’t so sure. After sizing up his tiny, bespectacled successor, he began referring to him as “Birdy.” One day, as he sat with an aide gazing out his residence windows toward the statue of Our Lady of Fatima, the dying Cardinal mused, “Birdy’s going to take his rosary beads and trot around that statue out there saying his prayers. Then he’ll come back and find his problems are still here.”
Under the blazing Azorean sun, the whitewashed façade of Nossa Senhora de Saude Church dazzled his eyes until they ached. But the wooden pews, lit only by shafts of dusky light from the rose windows, were cool, tranquil, and consoling. That was Humberto Medeiros’ favorite spot, a refuge from the stern austerity of home and school, an intimation of glories reserved for those who served Christ with all their hearts. When he was barely seven Humberto began attending Mass every day, perched beside his aged grandmother in her black shawl; and by the time he took his first communion there four years later, he knew he wanted to be a priest. The Church dominated the village of Arrifes on São Miguel, the largest island in the Portuguese Azores, where Humberto was born in 1915. His father, Antônio de Sousa Medeiros, raised vegetables on the rocky hillsides and ran a small variety store in the village. But by 1923 he had fallen deeply in debt and set off for America seeking more profitable labor. Between 1923 and 1928, Antônio Medeiros made three trips to America, working at a Fall River cotton mill, a nearby truck farm, a New York construction site, and a California ranch. When his family’s turn arrived on the Portuguese immigration quota, he returned to Fall River, retrieved his job on the farm, and rented a tiny apartment on Davol Street.
In Arrifes, Maria Medeiros and her four children—Humberto, then fifteen; Leonel, thirteen; Manuel, eleven; and Natalie, eight—thought of America as a fairy-tale land, filled with incalculable riches. Arriving in April 1931, they were unprepared for the sour reality of Fall River’s North End. A narrow spit of land wedged between the muddy Taunton River and the industrial wastes of Watuppa Pond, the North End was a fierce ethnic battleground. In its streets and alleys jostled three mutually hostile immigrant groups: the Irish, who had settled there first in the 1850s, gradually appropriating the best jobs and political control of the city; the French Canadians, who arrived a quarter century later and, after decades of discrimination, were just getting a toehold on respectability; and the Portuguese, now the bottom of the heap. When a Portuguese boy walked down Davol Street, the Irish and French kids would shout, “Portuguese stink fish,” a gibe at the maritime stench which clung to his boots.
Although they lived virtually on top of each other, the three nationalities preserved separate institutional lives. There was St. Joseph’s, the Irish Church, St. Mathieu’s, the French church, and St. Michael’s, the Portuguese church, each delivering sermons in its own language, an essential for many immigrants who—like Maria Medeiros—never learned English. At first, the Medeiros children spoke little English either. Soon they were installed at the Danforth Street School, widely known as “the dumbbell school,” because it served children with learning disabilities, emotional problems, and records of minor delinquency. Although the Medeiros boys’ only disability was their language, every morning as they walked to school they endured the taunts of neighborhood kids.
But his teachers soon discovered that Humberto was no dumbbell. Recognizing not only exceptional intelligence but artistic aptitude in the young immigrant, they helped him enroll in New Bedford’s Swain School of Art. But that was a luxury the family could ill afford. By then the Depression was in full stride, cutting a terrible swath through Fall River’s cotton industry. Soon the city which had boasted more spindles than Manchester, England, was filled with unemployed textile workers clamoring for relief.
The winter of 1932–33 was a bitter one for the Medeiroses. When his oldest son turned sixteen, Antônio insisted that he quit school and help support the family. In late 1932, Humberto became a sweeper at the Sagamore Mills, cleaning the alleys between the spinning frames for sixty-two cents a day. But his determination to receive an education never slackened; every evening after work and on weekends he studied French, Latin, algebra, and English. Only in January 1935, when his two brothers replaced him at the mill, could he return to school.
His preparations paid off handsomely. Admitted to Durfee High School as a sophomore, Humberto completed the four-year course in two and a half years, graduating first in his class of 651, compiling the best academic record in the school’s history, He starred in the debating and drama societies. At graduation ceremonies in June 1937, he delivered a stirring oration, concluding with a challenge from Horace Mann: “Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity!” His classmates bestowed on him no fewer than seven superlatives: most brilliant, most original, most dignified, most studious, most talented, most interesting, and most promising.
Yet his years at Durfee weren’t altogether happy ones. The school’s oldest student, he was an awkward youth with no athletic prowess, a future priest who didn’t drink, dance, or date, a “Portogee” in a school still dominated by the Irish, a figure so formidable his classmates held him in baffled, and uneasy, awe.
After the Fall River News-Herald lauded his academic record and described a mural of the Crucifixion he had painted for a Portuguese church, a wealthy Yankee widow named Florence Hutchinson offered to put him through Harvard. When Medeiros said he was going to be a priest, the Unitarian dowager decried the “terrible waste” of his talents, though she relented somewhat and contributed three hundred dollars toward his tuition at Washington’s Catholic University.
Nine years later, Medeiros returned to Fall River as a priest, assigned to St. John of God Church, the parish where his mural hung behind the altar. The city’s clergy were still rigidly Balkanized, grouped in Irish, French, and Portuguese “leagues,” rarely crossing ethnic boundaries. For five years as a young curate Medeiros made the narrow circuit of Portuguese parishes. He had every reason to believe he would end his days as pastor of one of those churches.
What changed everything was the patronage of Bishop James Cassidy, an autocratic Irishman with a potent voice in Fall River politics. Cassidy knew that the Irish monopoly on his diocese couldn’t last forever; one day soon a Portuguese priest would have to rise in the hierarchy. For years he had been watching Medeiros, and in 1950, when the young priest returned from a year of doctoral study in Rome, the Bishop took not one, but two unprecedented steps. He placed Medeiros at Holy Name Church, a lace-curtain Irish parish on the hill, and he named him assistant to the chanc
ellor of the diocese. Under Cassidy’s successor, James Connolly, his advancement was even more rapid: Vicar for Religious, vice-chancellor, and, soon, chancellor.
Those who knew Medeiros then detected little ambition for promotion. His thirst was for learning—already he had accumulated four degrees (including the prized doctorate in sacred theology) and nine languages (Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, German, French, and English). He often thought he would be happier teaching at a seminary or university. With his close friend Father John Driscoll, he wondered why any priest would accept the bishop’s miter, with all its financial and administrative responsibilities.
But by then his advancement was inevitable. After Medeiros was named Bishop of Brownsville in June 1966, Driscoll rushed to his friend’s rectory, where a celebration was underway. “Well?” he asked.
Medeiros looked up at him with a melancholy smile. “Like all the others,” he said, “I took it.”
Hardly an ecclesiastical plum, Brownsville was so remote that Medeiros had to look it up in an atlas. One of the nation’s smallest dioceses, it had only 234,700 Catholics and 82 priests spread out over 4,226 square miles. Most of its communicants were desperately poor Mexican-American farm workers, earning eighty-five cents an hour in the fields, struggling to feed large families on twenty to thirty dollars a week. The nation’s newest diocese, carved from the Corpus Christi region only eleven months before, Brownsville had been without a bishop since the first incumbent died in Germany on his way to take up the assignment. Medeiros was literally starting from scratch—with only the sparest of resources. Moreover, he was to arrive in Brownsville at a critical juncture in the valley’s history. On June 1, Cesar Chavez’s United Farm Workers had called fruit pickers out on strike at Starr County’s melon farms, demanding a $1.25-an-hour minimum wage and union recognition. But the growers continued to harvest the crops with the help of Mexican “green-carders,” so called because they had green permits authorizing them to cross the Rio Grande every day to work in the valley. The union, of course, regarded them as strikebreakers.
In the weeks between the start of the strike and Medeiros’ arrival, the Church had already become deeply embroiled in the conflict. Clerical intervention came not from Brownsville, where the clergy was notoriously cautious, but from the Archdiocese of San Antonio, 250 miles to the north. San Antonio’s Archbishop, Robert E. Lucey, was a fighting liberal, nationally known for his activism on behalf of the poor, minorities, and unions. Within days the Bishop’s Committee for the Spanish-Speaking had dispatched food and clothing to the valley, followed quickly by three priests, who held rallies and Masses for the farm workers. One of them stood on the steps of the county courthouse and said, “These people are going to march and march until they have their rights and we’re going to be marching with them every step of the way.”
Priests in the Brownsville diocese—long dependent on wealthy landowners for their financial subsidies—resented the outsiders, who were soon augmented by more priests from Houston, Galveston, and Amarillo. It was one thing for these activists to play prophet for a few days, then return to their comfortable rectories in the big city; quite another for the resident priests to live with the consequences of their zeal. On June 19, Monsignor Don Laning of Mission, Texas, denounced the “intruders” and “impostors.” Archbishop Lucey struck back, attacking the valley priests as old-guard clerics indifferent to human suffering.
Into this wrangle, on June 26, stepped the new bishop. In his first public comment on the strike, Medeiros urged the farm workers and growers to settle their differences “in a Christian manner.” Beyond that, he had no suggestions; the Church couldn’t shirk its responsibilities in the secular realm, he said, but the solution to such disputes should be left to sociologists and economists. The Brownsville Herald, which had denounced Lucey as a left-wing meddler, praised the new bishop for his “judicious exercise of restraint.”
In time, recognizing that he couldn’t remain neutral, Medeiros supported the workers’ demands for a living wage. “What they demand is theirs by natural right,” he said. “We have no time to waste. We must hurry to bring about the needed reforms for situations whose injustice cries to heaven.” He contributed $1,500 for use among the farm workers in Starr County, and when the strikers marched to the state capitol he met them at San Juan, offering Mass and defending their right to join a union and strike for “elemental human rights.”
His position was more balanced than Lucey’s. He stressed that employers had the right to defend themselves against unjust demands by labor unions, he urged laymen rather than priests to take an active role, and he discouraged outsiders from becoming further involved, emphasizing that the dispute had to be resolved locally. But he jousted openly with the growers, some of whom had apparently expected him to function as their private chaplain. He chastised them for their narrow perspective, warning that “fifty dollars in the collection box does not make you a Christian.” When they denounced him for consorting with militant Chicanos such as the Mexican-American Youth Organization, or MAYOS, he stood his ground. “If Christ lived today,” he once said, “do you think he would cut himself off from the MAYOS or the Black Panthers? He might not approve of everything they were doing, but he wouldn’t isolate himself from them.”
The valley’s churches were segregated by class as well as by race. Medeiros’ efforts to integrate them angered both Anglo and Chicano growers. The wife of one prosperous Chicano asked him, “Do you really expect me to go to church and kneel beside my servants?”
“Madam,” Medeiros said, “I don’t expect you to go to church. The way you are behaving, I expect you to go to hell.”
Yet his critics in the union contend that Medeiros bent to the landowners’ financial and political pressure, undercutting more militant support for the strike from forces surrounding Archbishop Lucey. Still, the Church can hardly be blamed for the collapse of the strike, which fell victim a year later to intransigent growers, tough Texas Rangers, persistent “green-carders,” and hurricane Beulah, which swept through the valley, destroying 90 percent of the citrus crop and sharply reducing the demand for farm labor. In January 1968, Chavez called off the strike, resolving instead to establish a credit union, a legal-aid center, and a health clinic for farm workers. In this less polarized setting, Medeiros functioned effectively as an ally of the workers. For two weeks, in 1969 and 1970, he joined their migration north as they followed the crops, visiting their ramshackle camps, saying Mass in the fields. He dramatized his identification with the dispossessed by spending each Christmas and Easter in jail, explaining, “I want to be with the people who need me.” To relieve the valley’s acute housing shortage, he funneled money from Catholic charities into a housing scheme for low-income families. By the time he left in 1970, he had earned extraordinary devotion from the valley’s Catholics.
From the start in Boston, Medeiros encouraged hopes that he would reach out to the underprivileged there as he had in Texas. “It is impossible to be a Christian without being concerned for every man, without being involved in the real-life situation of every brother,” he said in his installation speech. Most of Boston’s priests, whatever their ideological orientation, looked to the new Archbishop—still vigorous at fifty-five—as a man who could give Boston’s Church a fresh sense of purpose.
For a while Medeiros assiduously made the rounds of bailiwick, often charming those he met along the way. He was at his best in a pastoral role, exuding warmth and simplicity. Once, on a visit to a school for retarded children, he preached a charming little sermon. Then five children rose and held up drawings of sheep.
“Who takes care of the sheep?” asked the school chaplain.
“The shepherd,” replied the children.
“There’s a shepherd in this room,” said the chaplain. “Can anyone tell who he is?”
A little boy shouted, “Bishop Medeiros!”
“Thank you, children,” the Archbishop replied, enfolding several of t
he grinning youngsters in a tight embrace. “Thank you, my little sheep.”
Not everyone responded so warmly. Some older Irish pastors, in particular, resented Medeiros deeply and made no secret of their displeasure. In rectories throughout the diocese, priests vied with each other to imitate his lilting, sing-song delivery. If Cushing had been known affectionately as “the Cush,” now Medeiros became—in parody—“the Hum,” and his residence, “Humberto’s Hacienda.”
Once, at a meeting of priests, someone said, “Your Archbishop has spoken on that issue.”
“My Archbishop is six feet under,” snapped a senior pastor.
And there were unconfirmed reports of much worse: priests turning their backs on the Archbishop and stalking from the room; racial epithets muttered under the breath and, on at least one occasion, spoken directly in his face.
Recognizing the depth of this resentment, Medeiros sought to ingratiate himself with Boston’s Irish. On St. Patrick’s Day eve in 1971, he dined with the Ancient Order of Hibernians, who endowed him with their customary regalia: a gnarled shillelagh, a green tam-o’-shanter, and a Probate Court decree authorizing him to change his name every St. Patrick’s Day to “O’Medeiros.” In turn, the Archbishop conveniently overlooked the ethnic skirmishing in Fall River’s North End, the gibes at Durfee High, the careless snubs of Irish priests, not to mention more recent indignities. “I am very much at home among the Irish because they have shown such real love and devotion to me,” he said with the trace of a brogue he attributed to “the saintly Miss Flanagan and the wonderful Miss Kerrigan.” Then he sang snatches of his “favorite songs”—“Galway Bay” and “Danny Boy”—and rendered an uncanny impersonation of the actor Barry Fitzgerald (the elderly priest in that sentimental tintype of Irish Catholic life, Going My Way). Two years later—after his elevation to Cardinal—he even marched in the St. Patrick’s Day parade, pumping hands and blessing babies along the route.
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