Cardinal Bernardin on PBS

Perhaps most of the letters you receive are responses to articles. This one is in response to an advertisement you carried in the June 28-July 4 issue (and which also appeared in Our Sunday Visitor and probably other Catholic publications).

The ad was placed by the Catholic Communication Campaign and promoted a television program on the recently departed Joseph Cardinal Bernardin. The program, which I have read about but not seen, appears to be an entirely positive hagiography of the “beloved American Churchman,” produced under the auspices of PBS: the same organization that in recent years produced a documentary debunking the Shroud of Turin (by carbon-dating methods that were later proven unreliable), and other programs that vilify such figures in our Church's history as Pius IX, who has become (along with Pius XII) a favorite “bad-boy” for secular humanist historians and their liberal Catholic followers. They often convey these viewpoints in “documentaries” that appear objective and indisputable, but in reality convey information in ways that are often slanted against the Church.

What the PBS documentary — and indeed, almost all the coverage in the “mainstream” press of the life and death of Cardinal Bernardin — fails to mention is that there was a “dark side” to the life and legacy of this prelate. I used to wonder why the secular press lavished so much fawning attention on him. Then, with further reading and reflecting I realized: he was the model bishop for all those who do not accept the full gamut of the Church's teachings; and they are legion (both within and without the Church).

I do not presume to judge the cardinal's soul; only God can do that, and I would not consider it unreasonable to believe that — after due time in Purgatory — he is now or will eventually be with our Lord in Heaven. He was certainly a nice man. The problem is: he was too nice.

Rather than defending the Church's unpopular and misunderstood teachings, he spent undue time and energy to show compassion and understanding to those who hate and persecute the Church, so much so, that he was criticized by some of his fellow bishops (Boston's Bernard Cardinal Law, among others) for elevating dissent to an equal level with Church teaching.

No wonder outfits such as PBS and Newsweek — which have never been friendly to the whole Catholic faith — would dub him “the consummate churchman,” and such like titles. Somewhat like Cardinal Woolsey under Henry VIII, he was an extraordinarily capable, intelligent, and likable man; but also like Woolsey, when the “chips were down,” his support for the Holy Father and the full teachings of the Church (including the unpopular ones) were something less than firm and unequivocal.

We must question certain aspects of Cardinal Bernardin's legacy which are very unlikely to receive mention in the PBS special, such as the large number of parishes in the Chicago archdiocese which closed during his tenure, as a result of declining numbers of Catholic faithful and a declining supply of new priests (patterns which are not occurring in, for instance, Bishop Fabian Bruskewitz's diocese, or, for that matter John Cardinal O'Connor's). We should pay greater attention than PBS does to the large number of critics of the Common Ground Initiative, whose ranks include several of his fellow bishops, theologian Father Avery Dulles, the editor of the New Oxford Review, Dale Vree, and many others. We should heed the voices of the pro-life leaders who felt that his “consistent ethic of life” argument actually undermined the pro-life cause by presenting the perceived immorality of the death penalty as in some way comparable to the far more heinous crime of abortion.

If this were an ideal world, the advertisement for the PBS special that you (and other Catholic publications) carried, would contain a warning: “buyer beware.” The slogan read: “an intimate look … by those who knew him best.” A more honest caption would perhaps read: “an intimate look by those who liked him best;” the two categories are not necessarily one and the same. Bernardin may have been something of a “consummate American churchman,” but the more urgent question for us now (and for him, before Our Lord's judgment seat) is certainly: to what degree was he a “consummate Roman Churchman”? To what degree did he follow and defend the leadership of the Holy Father, who is given by God as Peter among us?

Larry Carstens North Hollywood, California