Cardinal Joseph Bernardin’s Pastoral Approach Echoes Through the Catholic Church Today

National Catholic Register, 16 November 2021

There are lessons to be learned from the Chicago cardinal, who died 25 years ago, in today’s climate of synodality.

The U.S. bishops arrived in Baltimore on Sunday on the 25th anniversary of the death of Cardinal Joseph Bernardin of Chicago. It was fitting, as Cardinal Bernardin was the great architect of the USCCB, serving as its first and formative general secretary from 1968 to 1972, and later as president, from 1974 to 1977. He was, in the judgment of George Weigel, “arguably the most powerful Catholic prelate in American history; he was certainly the most consequential since the heyday of James Cardinal Gibbons of Baltimore in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.”

Weigel, writing in 2011, declared the “Bernardin Era” was over. Ten years later, though, there remain lessons to be learned from the late cardinal. 

Seamless Garment 

Cardinal Bernardin would have found echoes of his pastoral approach in the pontificate of Pope Francis. His “seamless garment” approach to life issues comports with the Holy Father’s insistence that abortion should be addressed in the wider array of life issues, including the death penalty and poverty. 

At the same time, the courtly Southern gentleman from Charleston, South Carolina, would likely blanch at the harshness with which Pope Francis expresses himself. “Hiring an assassin” is not how the charming Cardinal Bernardin spoke, and he was always careful not to ruffle feathers.

Bureaucratic Clericalism

When Joseph Bernardin arrived in Chicago from Cincinnati, he succeeded Cardinal John Cody, a figure deeply associated with the clericalism now routinely denounced — authoritarian, privileged, distant. Archbishop Bernardin was a new breed of bishop; indeed, the archetypal bishop of the 1970s. He was collegial, consultative and collaborative. He adopted an informal, warm style: “I am Joseph, your brother,” he introduced himself. That went over well; that the biblical Joseph he quoted was the senior administrative officer in Egypt regime was also fitting, if overlooked. 

Cardinal Bernardin was the master bureaucratic tactician. He advanced another form of clericalism, the bureaucratic clericalism of offices and administrators, where structures grew massively and busied themselves with issuing grandiloquent statements on a vast array of topics. 

The USCCB (actually, its predecessor structures, the National Conference of Catholic Bishops and the U.S. Catholic Conference) was developed as a clerical bureaucracy par excellence during Cardinal Bernardin’s reign as primus inter pares of the American episcopate. 

Instructive was the contrast with Cardinal John O’Connor of New York, who famously had little time for bureaucratic maneuvering and consequently for the episcopal conference. It may have been that Cardinal O’Connor realized early on that, despite his many gifts and decades in the bureaucratic environment of the U.S. Navy, he was no match for Cardinal Bernardin in organizing “the body” of bishops, as the conference came to be known in insider parlance.

Pope Francis inveighs against clericalism of the bad old sort regularly; but on bureaucratic clericalism, in which a welter of administrative offices controls the energies of the Church, his approach is ambiguous. 

On the one hand, a Church tied up in meetings, instead of getting dirty in the streets, is anathema to him. On the other hand, he has piled synod upon synod on the Church, each with an ever more exhaustive set of consultative procedures.

The Synod on Synodality, currently in the planetary phase of its consultation, would have delighted Cardinal Bernardin. An increasing mass of meetings and proliferation of processes in the Church means greater influence for the administrators needed to coordinate all the paper. 

Cardinal Bernardin would have been adept at producing from the synodal consultations exactly the result that he and his allies desired, no matter who was consulted. Clericalism goes by many names.

Sexual Misconduct

Cardinal Bernardin was the first senior prelate, let alone cardinal, to be accused of sexual misconduct in the glare of global publicity. The allegation, which landed on the front page of every newspaper in the world in 1993, was made by a former seminarian. Within a year, the accusation was withdrawn, and the seminarian complained that he had been manipulated by others into making a false accusation. Cardinal Bernardin was exonerated and even traveled to meet his accuser in a moving act of reconciliation. 

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