Coming Home

John Cardinal O'Connor

Yesterday was the tenth anniversary of John Cardinal O’Connor’s entrance into eternal life. I have not a shred of doubt that he either entered directly into the presence of God, or made an extremely brief layover en-route to tie up a few loose ends. (For my Protestant brothers and sisters, I’m referring to that pesky little Catholic concept of Purgatory)

What has never been in doubt for me is that Cardinal O’Connor was an extraordinary man, called to an extraordinary task, in a very turbulent time in the life of the Church, in the most media-dense diocese on the planet. Also never in doubt was that he succeeded in all that he was called to do.

For a good, tight biography on Cardinal O’Connor, click here. This, from the article:

“Every priest would like to be remembered as a priest and all that it conveys, rather than as a public figure with all that it conveys,” Cardinal O’Connor once reflected when asked how he would like to be remembered. He then added, “I regularly go down to the crypt under St. Patrick’s Cathedral and I look at the tombs of my predecessors. Right in the center is the next marble block with no inscription. That’s reserved for me. And all that’s important when I move into the crypt is that I have served New York as a very good priest.” And a very good priest he was.

Indeed.

Of all the figures in Christian History, Cardinal O’Connor seems most like the Apostle Paul. The New York City that he came to live in was a city proclaimed by the rest of the country to be ungovernable. The movies of the era portray an out-of control metropolis not altogether unlike the Corinth of Paul’s day. I know. I was there in Times Square for seven years working at Covenant House with teen prostitutes. Eighth Avenue, from the Port Authority Bus Terminal at 42nd Street to 48th Street was called the Minnesota Strip, so named for the countless teens from the midwest running from home and being abducted into prostitution. Porn theaters and video stores numbered literally in the scores. Live sex shows abounded. Drug dealing was brisk business.

This was Archbishop John O’Connor’s new home.

More than almost any cleric of his day, Cardinal O’Connor read the moral landscape with deadly accuracy. He understood that the Church was at that point very much in free-fall with mass defections of priests and religious, laity openly flaunting their use of oral contraception and abortion, cohabitation, and rampant divorce. He saw the moral relativism around the issues concerning marriage, sex and life at both ends of the spectrum as the primary target of the enemy, as these reveal to humanity the inner life of the Trinity when properly lived in marriage.

He wasted no time in setting about articulating with forceful clarity the position of the Church regarding abortion, contraception, cohabitation, fornication, and homosexual sex. This would bring him into a showdown with a very popular Mayor Ed Koch and Governor Mario Cuomo, the latter being a Catholic who challenged the church on abortion. The media would flay O’Connor alive for it.

Though pilloried, I marveled at his evenness, his steely determination and great self-control. I can’t ever remember him lashing out personally at his antagonizers and tormentors, the most hate-filled and vicious of whom were the homosexuals during the early years of the AIDS crisis.

Far from the sweetly plaintive victims of misunderstanding and oppression as they often characterized themselves, the homosexual community waged war against the Cardinal and the Church with a sustained viciousness and brutality that was chilling. They interrupted Sunday Masses by sitting in blocks and then standing with their backs turned to the Cardinal during his homilies to protest his lack of imprimatur on their lifestyle, and his refusal to embrace condoms as a means of facilitating their fornication without consequence.

I was there as an eyewitness on several occasions. Cardinal O’Connor would urge us to pray for them.

The homosexual community’s war was waged over several years, culminating in thousands descending on the Cathedral one Sunday desecrating it at Communion time by throwing condoms all around, and in one instance, crumbling the Blessed Sacrament and throwing it on the ground. 110 protestors were arrested that day.

I detailed that war against Cardinal O’Connor, and how science has vindicated him, in a four part series entitled, “Of Cardinals, Cathedrals, Condoms, and Cretins”. Click each one below for a read that is simply incredible. No one can understand this man and how viciously he was maligned or how faithful and correct he was absent the context wrought by these articles:

Part I
Part II
Part III
Part IV

The more I would read Saint Paul, the more I saw him before me in John O’Connor. Tough, smart, compassionate, unyielding, and faithful to the last. Next time: Roe v. Wade’s worst nightmare, the founder of Sisters of Life.