COMMENTARY: Familiar Architecture in New Archbishop

c. 2000 Religion News Service (Eugene Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author most recently of “My Brother Joseph,” published by St. Martin Press.) (UNDATED) Before the week of John Cardinal O’Connor’s burial was out, his successor, Archbishop Edward Egan, was […]

c. 2000 Religion News Service

(Eugene Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author most recently of “My Brother Joseph,” published by St. Martin Press.)

(UNDATED) Before the week of John Cardinal O’Connor’s burial was out, his successor, Archbishop Edward Egan, was in. Both men’s Irish ancestors might have crossed themselves against any bad luck that might come from this speed, “seeing the poor man is hardly cold in his grave.”


If this transition offers a meditation on mortality, it also provides instruction on how fast Rome can act when the space/information age collapses its traditional hierarchical tiers and makes it impossible to keep information out of everybody else’s reach.

Although the appointment of the former Chicago priest to New York seems to be the big Catholic religious story of the week, it is not as big as the story that the Vatican cannot keep its secrets the way it used to.

This resonates, as the funeral itself did, with ironies that are worth pondering by those who believe the church can find its way back into the splendid isolation from the world that brings on fits of nostalgia in many traditional Catholics.

The breaking of the secrecy on Egan’s appointment signals the weakening of the hierarchical architecture of the church while the assignment of Egan himself signals that the pope wants to strengthen it.

Edward Egan was appointed to put all his energy into being what his own announcement marks as a difficult, if not impossible in the modern world _ a hierarch whose title “His Eminence” reflects the heights he is supposed to inhabit.

The medium is here clearly the message _ that is, that hierarchies do not, indeed cannot, function well in a world flattened and foreshortened by communications changes. The middle has dropped out of organizations in industrialized societies because the middle man has been retired along with the blacksmith and the buggy whip manufacturer as no longer needed.

When everybody can tap into the same information at virtually the same moment, the distance between the boss and the office boy vanishes. That is why, in corporate downsizing over the past decade and more, middle managers were the first to go.


Archbishop-designate Egan is a fine and devoted priest but neither he, nor the pope who obviously has such faith in him, can make this challenge easy or, indeed, capable of accomplishment. It is not that Catholics do not want to cooperate with Church authority; it is that many of them, because of their good Catholic education, now stand on the same plane with their pastors and their bishops. You cannot look down on, even benignly, men and women who are looking you in the eye from the same level playing field of theological understanding.

Nor should one think that Catholics are eager to pick a fight with their bishops or any other church figure. They are generally happy with them but they can no longer be excluded from decision making nor do they believe, if ever they really did, that “Father knows best” or “These things should be left to the clergy.” They have put away the things of children.

Egan may have reflected on these matters during the nationally televised funeral of Cardinal O’Connor. That, too, with its great ritual and color, made Manhattan, and perhaps the whole country, stop and hold its breath for at least the portion of a day.

Yet the funeral reflected, as truly as the soaring pillars of St. Patrick’s did, the architecture of the hierarchical church. The cardinals and bishops sat in the elevated sanctuary, that small but telling detail about a congregation of mourners who were still arranged from highest to lowest, from greatest to least.

Moving as it was, the entire service was begun and ended within the architecture of the church. He was eulogized by Boston’s Cardinal Bernard Law, who has been the most influential American in Rome for many years. Cardinal O’Connor’s body was borne down beneath the main altar to rest with the prelates who went before him. A fine and fitting funeral for a great man whose life was truly contained within the walls of the church.

In commenting on the event in The New York Times, Peter Steinfels allowed himself a distraction of several paragraphs about the 1996 funeral of Chicago’s Joseph Cardinal Bernardin, so different in so many ways.


It was a collegial funeral in which priests and people sat, probably without plan, on the same level. Lay people participated extensively, the music was in many languages, and he was eulogized by the priest who had cared for him in his last months. His body was carried through 10 miles of streets crowded by Catholics and non-Catholics alike to be buried in a bishops’ tomb at the center of a cemetery whose sections resemble the old city blocks of Chicago, the Italians here, and the Irish there and the Polish just beyond them.

Egan will get a lot of unsolicited advice as he takes over his new office. If he did nothing more that meditate on these two funerals, and the two images of the church they reflected, he would be well prepared for the extraordinary challenges that lie before him.

DEA END KENNEDY

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