Common Ground (81 page)

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 the 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.

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?