From the pulpit where he stood one day last week, Richard James Cardinal
Cushing, 68, looked down not at the familiar Irish faces of his own
Boston congregation but rather into the docile and questioning gaze of
brown Peruvian eyes. The occasion was the blessing of a new
brick-and-concrete Roman Catholic church in a slum suburb of Lima. “Mindful of the fact that you live in an agricultural
country,” rumbled Cushing, “I presume you know what an ass
is. We read in the New Testament that our blessed Lord rode on an ass
in triumph into the city of Jerusalem. Today the Lord rides on another
ass: I myself. “I can't even talk your language,” said the cardinal humbly . “I know only one
language—the language of the heart—that is, the language of love.
And I give you all my bountiful measure of love.” Crusty & Contrary. Cushing this month is visiting the churches and
the 135 priests of the Society of St. James the Apostle, which he
founded six years ago in alarmed awareness that Latin America, where
priests are fewest in proportion to professed Catholics, is perilously
open to Communist appeals. Through the
lowering heat of coastal Ecuador and the wintry mist of Peru, he worked
until exhaustion, made worse by his bad health, left him unable to
talk. He heartened priests, preached long sermons, blessed edifices of
various kinds, and everywhere took delight in children.
At one town he poured milk into the mugs of several hundred assembled
urchins. In a penniless orphanage he committed himself to vast
purchases of ice cream for kids, and, reminded that he must always
raise money for the missionary society and much more besides, reduced
some little girls to giggles by saying, “If you ever marry a
millionaire, introduce him to me.” One symbolic act of his visit was a simple inspection of his mission's
half-finished Church of the Virgin of the Door in Peru's boomtown,
anchovy-fishing city of Chimbote. In that church the altar is placed to
let the priest face the congregation, in contrast to centuries of
practice and in compliance with Catholicism's current aggiornamento.
Cushing has encouraged all of his missionary priests to stay in tune
with the times. For if there is a bit of the Last Hurrah in Boston's
crusty and contrary Cardinal Cushing, there is also a generous measure
of the new spirit of Pope John XXIII. He personally illustrates the
stirring of that placid giant of Roman Catholicism, the church in the
U.S. Nuns on Picket Lines. This surge of renewal is more concerned with the
structure of the church than the substance of doctrine, more with
practical questions of morality and Christian living than with abstract
theological problems. Renewal, American-style, deals with freedom
within the church, with the kind of rebellion that does not end in the
classic “leaving the church.”
