TOP STORY: MEDITATION: Embracing his own death, Bernardin puts Kevorkian to shame

c. 1996 Religion News Service (Eugene Kennedy is a writer living in Chicago.) CHICAGO _ Cardinal Joseph Bernardin dresses conventionally, speaks in a zephyr-gentle voice and has spent most of his life as a priest and a bishop behind a desk. He has never led a demonstration, picketed an abortion clinic, spilled animal blood at […]

c. 1996 Religion News Service

(Eugene Kennedy is a writer living in Chicago.)

CHICAGO _ Cardinal Joseph Bernardin dresses conventionally, speaks in a zephyr-gentle voice and has spent most of his life as a priest and a bishop behind a desk. He has never led a demonstration, picketed an abortion clinic, spilled animal blood at a weapons testing ground, or spent a night in prison for a cause.


Nonetheless, the archbishop of Chicago, now dying of cancer, is the most counter-cultural figure in the American landscape.

His life and work go against the grain of a popular culture that seeks fulfillment by cultivating abdominal muscles instead of the soul and believes the waters of salvation come in bottles stamped Evian.

Such a superficial culture, largely the product of advertising and public relations, substitutes slogans for the words of eternal life. Its morality is structured on incomplete sentences that it is either unwilling or unable to finish. These include”a woman’s right to choose”and the”public’s right to know.”Supply and study deeply the never-stated objects in such sentences and the issues might take on a moral vigor that the popular culture wishes neither to identify or to contemplate.

These truncated catch-phrases are complemented by an expanding list of”rights,”including, most recently, an alleged”right to die.” The claim’s ghoulish apostle, Dr. Jack Kevorkian, boasts of having assisted at 46 suicides. He is never very careful about his clients’ diagnosis or whether they are suffering from the treatable illness of depression. Prosecutors, who have failed to make a case in law against him, are about to try again over recent cases in Michigan.

Finally, however, the case against this serial dispatcher will not be made in a courtroom but in the hearts of those enabled by figures like Cardinal Bernardin to see”Doctor Death”and his one-way tickets in perspective.

Kevorkian recently admitted that he helped a 54-year-old Michigan woman with multiple sclerosis end her life on August 30. On the same day, a few hundred miles west in Chicago, Cardinal Bernardin announced at a crowded press conference that his cancer had returned and that he had a year or less to live.

He spoke simply, without self-pity or self-dramatization.”While I know, humanly speaking, I will have to deal with difficult moments, I can say in all sincerity that I am at peace. I consider this as God’s special gift for me at this moment in my life. … We can look at death as an enemy or a friend. If we see it as an enemy, death causes anxiety and fear. … As a person of faith, I see death as a friend, as the transition from earthly life to life eternal.” The gathered reporters, most of them death-averse boomers hardened by a hundred scenes of Chicago luminaries rationalizing their crooked schemes or their fallen states, stood transfixed for an instant at the conclusion of the cardinal’s remarks and then paid him the only tribute available; they burst into applause.

As one said afterwards,”He made it possible for us all to face our mortality, speak about our own deaths, and be braver in facing what’s important in life.” On October 17, in the most melancholy place of assignation in the American imagination, Kevorkian met a 58-year-old woman at a motel, helped her end her life and left her body at an emergency room in Royal Oak, Mich. So much for”death with dignity.” On the same day in Chicago, Cardinal Bernardin, suffering not only from cancer but from osteoporosis so severe that he hardly ever has a comfortable moment, announced that he was ending his chemotherapy but intended to go on working as long as he could.”My morale continues to be good,”he said with a smile,”and I am at peace.” Which of these two challenges the culture more: the one that says any pain may destroy our capacity to live or the one that says every pain may by faith be put at the service of living life fully?


Kevorkian loves the courtroom, for he sees it as the easily foiled modern forum from which he can escape free to carry on as a self-appointed executioner.

Cardinal Bernardin, however, prefers the public square, where he has championed the cause of life throughout his career, most notably in enunciating his consistent ethic of life. Sometimes termed the”seamless garment,”it is an ethic in which he demonstrates the linkage between the greater and smaller issues to be considered by those who adopt the pro-life position. If you are a believer, he has preached, you must support the right to life wherever and by whatever means it is threatened or its value diminished.

In the shadowed edge of our culture, the image is better than reality, the spin superior to the truth, and death in a dozen sweetened forms, from drugs to euthanasia, is the preferred way of dealing with the tragic nature of life.

No person more clearly _ or more gently _ confronts that stage-set substitute for life than Joseph Cardinal Bernardin, whose dying makes us more aware of what living is all about.

MJP END KENNEDY

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