In his eagerness to please, Medeiros at times resorted to the kind of high jinks with which Cushing had long beguiled Bostonians. Honoring the ancient rituals, he took the nuns to Nantasket Beach, riding with them on the bumper cars, gnawing on a candied apple. He manfully posed for photographers in sailor caps, construction helmets, and Indian headdresses. Once, serving up a Thanksgiving dinner at an old folks’ home, he even let the cameramen dress him in a chef’s hat and apron. But he knew it wasn’t working. “This isn’t me,” he plaintively exclaimed to a bystander.
Yet the real Medeiros—humble, righteous, intensely pious—was alien to many Bostonians. The Irish had always felt uncomfortable with public piety; it might be fitting in women, but in men it was somehow weak and prissy. Fall River’s Portuguese and Brownsville’s Chicanos might find Medeiros’ religiosity entirely appropriate, but in Charlestown and South Boston his Mediterranean style—the melancholy brown eyes, the folded hands, the head bent forward and slightly to the left in a “papal tilt,” the familiar “Jesus” instead of the straightforward “Christ,” the humility (“Lord, I am your useless servant”)—all reeked of incense and Byzantine rituals.
The cultural chasm was too deep. When Medeiros first attended an Irish wake in Boston, weeping by the bier, he was astonished to see several Irish priests laughing and joking nearby. The Irish liked a priest who treated his religion with a touch of irreverence: better still, a former halfback from Notre Dame or Boston College who could handle a pigskin as deftly as a chalice. Though Cushing never played football, he personified that muscular style. “I have tried to be a manly man and a priestly priest,” he once said. Medeiros suffered badly in such comparisons. He’d never been any good at sports. In Fall River, when parish children asked him to play basketball, he didn’t even know how to hold the ball. “I’m not too bad at shuttlecock,” he laughingly told reporters on his arrival in Boston, then, sensing how important sports were to Bostonians, quickly added, “I’d like to see the Red Sox—and the Bruins too.” But a few years later, when the Globe’s Irish columnist Mike Barnicle asked whether he’d seen any good hockey games lately, he said, “I like to see them skating and doing all that, but I don’t like it when they start fighting. I walked out the last time. It was awful, right under my nose and the people carrying on. It looked like the old Romans in the arena—more blood—and I walked out.”
Piety and personal example might suffice to govern a tiny rural diocese like Brownsville, with 40 parishes and 82 priests, but formidable political-administrative skills were required to manage a massive urban archdiocese such as Boston, with its two million Catholics, 406 parishes, and 2,500 priests. Almost from the start, Medeiros seemed overwhelmed by the task.
Within a year, he found himself at odds with the very forces which had most welcomed his appointment. The progressives in Boston’s Church quickly realized they had misread Medeiros’ record in Texas, perceiving him as a civil rights activist who would never hesitate to cast his lot with the poor and oppressed. Just a year after he took office, all sixteen members of the Archdiocesan Human Rights Commission threatened to resign unless he spoke out more forcefully on race and poverty. In a showdown at his residence, the Archbishop capitulated, agreeing to most of the commission’s demands, including a pastoral letter on urban problems, which he issued the following year as “Man’s Cities and God’s Poor.”
Still, in the bitter struggle over Boston’s schools, Medeiros remained profoundly cautious, as if fearing to stir the fires of Irish resentment. In March 1972, when a legislative committee heard testimony on the proposed repeal of the Racial Imbalance Act, he declined to appear personally as some of his advisers had urged. Instead, he released a statement—read to the committee by an aide—composed largely of lengthy quotations from Cardinal Cushing. A year later, when the repeal motion surfaced again, he issued a revised version of the same statement. Only in April 1974—as the act’s opponents mounted their last, most determined, campaign—did Medeiros take the stand himself and deliver an appeal for racial justice.
His temporizing disheartened the activists who had kept the pressure on Cushing during the sixties. Exhausted from their struggles, the Catholic Interracial Council and the Association of Boston Urban Priests gradually faded into oblivion. Repeatedly rebuffed, the Human Rights Commission—with the notable exception of its astute chairwoman, Pat Goler—became largely irrelevant. As some sixties firebrands left the priesthood in disillusionment and others retreated into routine parish work, the lobby for social commitment within the Church largely dissipated.
When Arthur Garrity issued his desegregation order in June 1974, Medeiros was notably silent. Protestant and Jewish leaders hailed the decision as “just” and “moral,” but his secretary doubted the Cardinal would make a statement “any time soon.” Only ten days later—in apparently offhand remarks after blessing the Gloucester fishing fleet—did Medeiros express measured satisfaction at the judge’s order. “Busing may not be the most desirable way to integrate,” he said, “but it’s all we have right now. As long as people keep calm and quiet, all will be fine.”
That set the tone for the Cardinal’s future statements on the issue. Consistently endorsing the underlying goal of racial integration—because “it is morally right”—he called for peaceful compliance with the law. But he sought to distance himself from busing itself. At times—as on October 22, 1974—he said flatly, “I am opposed to busing and I always have been.” At other times, he expressed himself more cautiously: “I didn’t say I believed in forced busing or that I was against it. That’s a means to an end. And how to plan the integration of the city, that’s beyond me. I have no competence there.”
With the Cardinal voicing such confusion, it was hardly surprising that priests throughout the diocese should have gone off in different directions. Some endorsed busing; many condemned violence; others rode the buses themselves to encourage peaceful implementation of the order. Still others—notably in South Boston—preached against the order, boldly encouraging their parishioners to resist it. There were those who wondered whether Cushing would ever have permitted the Church to speak with such disparate voices. Some suggested that the flamboyant Cardinal would have “put on the red” (dressed in his scarlet robes), taken a black child in one hand and a white child in the other, and marched up the steps of South Boston High, thus defining the Church’s position once and for all.
But this is probably to sentimentalize Cushing, whose instincts on such matters were deeply mixed. In any case, the time had long since passed when any Archbishop of Boston could settle such questions by mere fiat. The Church no longer played a decisive role in most Bostonians’ lives. Between 1960 and 1978, attendance at Mass declined from 75 percent to 55 percent of Greater Boston’s Catholics. Only 5 percent of the same Catholics said they would turn to a priest for advice on an urgent personal problem. Some of this disaffection could be traced to the Church’s teachings on birth control, which were markedly out of line with Catholic practices: one survey showed that 80 percent of married Catholics used some form of artificial contraception. Moreover, Vatican II had so democratized the Church that challenges to clerical authority were no longer scandalous. If the faithful could make their own conscientious decisions on many theological issues, how could they be denied liberty on questions like busing?
Though a bishop’s proclamations were often ineffectual, his actions could sometimes be decisive. As early as 1973, many churchmen realized that Boston’s Catholic schools might provide havens for refugees from busing, thus undermining desegregation. The parochial schools had good reasons to take what advantage they could from the situation. In Boston, as elsewhere, Catholic school enrollment had fallen off sharply since the mid-sixties—partly as a result of declining birth rates, partly because thousands of middle-class Catholics had moved to the suburbs, partly because Catholics were less committed to sectarian education than in years gone by, and partly because a shortage of teaching nuns compelled schools to
hire lay teachers at substantial salaries and thus sharply increase tuitions. Between 1965 and 1973, archdiocesan enrollment fell from 151,582 to 86,469, while more than a hundred Catholic schools closed their doors. Pastors and Sisters, struggling to keep their schools afloat, would presumably take any students they could get.
In February 1974, the Archdiocesan Board of Education—which Medeiros headed—sought to stem the expected influx by prohibiting all but a few special transfers into the city’s parochial schools. But this policy was deeply flawed, exempting 172 Catholic schools in the suburbs, many of which promptly admitted “refugees” from the city. During 1974–75, the sharp decline in parochial enrollment leveled off, while high school attendance even rose slightly.
This touched off a bitter struggle within the Church. Progressive priests and laymen demanded an airtight policy prohibiting all transfers, while Catholic schools warned that such a policy would put them out of business and Catholic parents asked how the Cardinal dared bar their children from schools built with their grandfathers’ hard-earned dimes and nickels. Ultimately, the Archdiocese struck a curious compromise, closing the suburban escape hatch, but promptly opening another. Henceforth, schools throughout the diocese could admit any public school student—without examining his motives—so long as he filled an existing vacancy caused by another student’s transfer or dropout. Thus, Catholic schools could exploit busing to stabilize—though, in theory, not to increase—their enrollments. Indeed, during 1975–76, nearly 4,200 students moved from Boston’s public schools into the Catholic system (at least two-thirds of them apparent refugees from busing). Some schools took advantage of the situation to swell their enrollments, one such “haven” being Somerville’s Little Flower School, which accepted dozens of students from adjacent Charlestown. Openly defying the Cardinal, Monsignor John Hogan said he would admit any Townie kid who applied, a stand which made him an overnight hero in Charlestown. As he marched in the Bunker Hill Day parade that June, parents rushed from the sidewalk to wring his hands in gratitude.
When evidence of such abuses surfaced in the fall of 1975, Medeiros announced that any priest or nun who had knowingly violated his policy would be “disciplined.” Later that winter, the Archdiocese wrote to twenty-two schools, demanding an explanation for their suddenly inflated enrollments. That was the extent of the “discipline.” Explaining the Cardinal’s inaction, his aides noted that priests and Sisters enjoyed “substantial autonomy” in running their schools and, in any case, a rebellious pastor could only be removed through a rare and “unseemly” canonical trial.
By then, Medeiros was loath to challenge the traditional Irish ethos prevailing in most old-line parishes. He had felt the muscle of the anti-busing movement and it frightened him. Three emissaries from ROAR had called on him, imploring him to intervene on their behalf with Judge Garrity. When the Cardinal declined, ROAR launched demonstrations outside his house, with protesters brandishing placards reading: “Why does the Cardinal hate white children?” and “O Lord, why hast thou forsaken me?” Such activists were only a tiny fragment of the city’s Catholics, but their presence outside his window seems to have awakened the Cardinal’s old anxieties about the aggressive Irish. More and more, he retreated behind the Chancery walls, ceding his responsibilities in this area to others.
Characteristically, he let different priests speak to different constituencies. His conservative “urban coordinator,” Father Paul Donovan, became the Cardinal’s ambassador to the alienated Irish, meeting with Louise Day Hicks and her lieutenants, reassuring them that the Church wasn’t their enemy. Later, Auxiliary Bishop Joseph Ruocco—a moderate, but the only Italian in the hierarchy and therefore something of an outsider—headed a committee to mobilize the clergy behind law and order. And a liberal, Father Michael Groden, was loaned to Arthur Garrity as staff director of the Citywide Coordinating Council, the judge’s watchdog agency.
The Cardinal still spoke out from time to time—occasionally with surprising passion—but he rarely followed through on his pronouncements. “I’m not a judge,” he would say. “I have no coercive powers…. All I can do is preach it, proclaim it, and let those who have ears to hear, hear. I can’t crack your head and stick the Book in there.” When critics questioned this narrow view of his authority, he asked gloomily, “What can I do? The more I say, the worse it gets.”
This incapacity spread to other areas. For a decade the Archdiocese had built low- and moderate-income housing on Church-owned land in the suburbs. Hundreds of units were already occupied in Beverly, Lexington, and North Andover, but in the affluent South Shore town of Scituate—on “the Irish Riviera”—parishioners of St. Mary’s of the Nativity Church blocked the development in a bitter court battle. When the Archdiocese finally prevailed in the Supreme Court, Medeiros surprisingly agreed to let eight parishioners sue him before the Church’s own tribunal, normally restricted to marriage cases. After prolonged hearings, the three-priest panel ruled that the parish had not been adequately consulted. Ballots were distributed after Mass one Sunday and the parish voted overwhelmingly against the project (prompting one priest to remark bitterly, “At the Church of the Nativity there is still no room at the inn”). Ultimately Medeiros found another site in Scituate, but the surrender raised new doubts about his leadership.
Unfortunately for the Cardinal, his diffidence lent itself to satire. The most wicked foray in this genre was an article in Boston Magazine, consisting entirely of aphorisms, riddles, and parables:
“How can you tell Cardinal Medeiros from a marshmallow?” “He is the one without the corners.”
“Why does Cardinal Medeiros carry pudding in his wallet?” “For identification.”
Nobody at the magazine had anticipated what was to follow. After the Pilot and a popular radio priest denounced the “scurrilous” piece, hundreds of protest letters poured in, advertisers withdrew their ads, the magazine fired its editor, and the author—an Irish Catholic columnist for the Herald American—was dismissed by his newspaper. But all this may have been less a rallying around the Cardinal himself than an old Boston Irish reflex toward any slight to their Church.
One of Medeiros’ liabilities was the massive debt he had inherited from his predecessor. Cushing had been a splendid benefactor, showering Boston’s Catholics with schools, hospitals, colleges, and a dazzling array of human services. Not only was Medeiros unable to continue this largesse, he had to take some of it away, a practice not calculated to win him any friends. When he entered office, the debt had reached $42 million. Medeiros was uncomfortable raising money, temperamentally disinclined to put the bite on wealthy communicants, so in May 1971 he launched a bureaucratic substitute, the Archbishop’s Stewardship Appeal. Reminding the faithful that “in this world we are only the stewards of the good things with which we are blessed,” he assessed each parish a portion of the $7.2 million target. Its first year, the drive fell a million dollars short. By 1974, when the anti-busing movement organized a boycott, it produced only $5.1 million, and later did only slightly better. Determined to reduce the debt, the Cardinal had no alternative but to pare spending sharply. Between 1970 and 1977, he cut the budget by 40 percent, closed facilities, and curtailed activities of the Archdiocese’s forty-three agencies. By 1977, the debt was down to a manageable $15 million, but clergy and parishioners alike bristled at the new austerity.
His social gospel stymied by Irish intransigence, his temporal programs crimped by budgetary restraints, the Cardinal increasingly devoted his energies to the defense of theological orthodoxy. Even before leaving Brownsville, he told an interviewer he supported the Pope “150 percent” on such critical questions as birth control, abortion, divorce, and clerical celibacy. And barely a month after reaching Boston, he bitterly excoriated the pro-abortion movement as “the new barbarism” which was “moving ruthlessly to upset the moral order established by God.”
When Protestants, Jews, and Catholic liberals voiced dismay at the Cardinal’s vehemence, Medeir
os only intensified his campaign, labeling abortion “the murder of the innocents,” ordering anti-abortion messages read from the pulpits of every parish, asking the faithful to sign “pro-life” pledges. In 1977, he mustered the Church’s waning political influence to pass a bill banning the use of Medicaid funds for abortions in Massachusetts. Several years later, he helped force the political retirement of Congressman Robert Drinan, a Jesuit priest who had supported liberalized abortion laws. Then, five days before the election of Drinan’s successor, Medeiros released a pastoral letter aimed at defeating Barney Frank, Kevin White’s former majordomo, whom Drinan was actively backing. “Those who make abortions possible by law—such as legislators and those who promote, defend, and elect these same lawmakers—cannot separate themselves from that guilt which accompanies this horrendous crime,” the Cardinal wrote. “It is imperative that Catholics realize the law of God extends into the polling booth.” But the voters—about 40 percent of them Catholics—went decisively for Frank, prompting some commentators to wonder whether the Cardinal hadn’t overstepped himself.
Medeiros showed little interest in the verdict of the Fourth Congressional District. On such matters, he had a constituency of one—the Pope. “I abide by the rules of the Church,” he would say. “Those rules come from God and the Holy Father.” A stickler for clerical tradition, Medeiros was rarely seen without his formal regalia—the crimson-edged black cassock, wide crimson sash, red skullcap, and ornate pectoral cross on a gold chain. While many Cardinals discouraged the formal address “Your Eminence” and kissing of the episcopal ring, Medeiros appreciated such acts of deference. His style was rarely authoritarian, but associates sometimes felt cold steel beneath his gentle piety. Once, speaking of a recalcitrant monsignor, he said, “The Jesus in me loves the Jesus in him, but frankly I don’t much care for the rest of him.” And there is the story of a young priest who had served as part-time speechwriter to Cushing and stayed on in the episcopal residence hoping to fill the same function for Medeiros. Each morning he came down to breakfast and looked hopefully at the new Archbishop, who didn’t know what to do with him. If such a problem had confronted Cushing, the old Cardinal might have growled, “Father, get your ass out of here!” One morning, Medeiros said, “Father, I spoke with Jesus last night. Jesus needs you in Cohasset.”
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