Cardinal Bernardin's Stations of the Cross: Transforming Our Grief and Loss into a New Life

By Eugene Kennedy

Joseph Cardinal Bernardin, the archbishop of Chicago, had long been considered the leader of American Catholicism and was so widely respected throughout the world that he was thought to be the only American who might become Pope. His life took another path, however, after he was falsely accused of sexual abuse in 1993. Vindicated and about to embark on a broad program of renewal, he was stricken with pancreatic cancer in 1995. His destiny, as those close to him soon sensed, was not to become a Pope but a saint instead.

Between his first diagnosis in June 1995 until the recurrence of his cancer in August, 1996, a period of fourteen months elapsed. There are fourteen stations in the traditional Catholic devotion of the Stations of the Cross that commemorate the events from Christ's judgment through his carrying of his cross to his crucifixion and death. In the last months of his life, Joseph Bernardin lived out those stations in his own life, from being judged unjustly by the high priest brother Cardinals who wanted to eliminate his influence in American Catholicism, to his bearing in his own cross, and from his last meeting with his mother to his public death, Cardinal Bernardin reproduced the passion and death of Jesus in his own. This book is a series of meditations on the traditional stations, based on scriptural scholarship, and the stations Bernardin lived, revealed by the author, Bernardin's close friend for thirty years.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Oct 22, 2013
• ISBN: 9781466855243

Eugene Kennedy

Eugene Kennedy is a psychologist and former priest, and the award-winning author of several books, including The Unhealed Wound: The Church, the Priesthood, and the Question of Sexuality and My Brother Joseph: The Spirit of a Cardinal and the Story of a Friendship. He writes a nationally syndicated column and lives with his wife, Sara Charles, M.D., in Chicago, Illinois.

Book preview

PREFACE:

A SONG OF FAITH FOR OUR SEASON OF LOSS

THE GREAT MYSTERY OF THE WORLD AS IT IS

We entered a new but ancient place together on September 11, 2001. Our kin dwelt here long ago and left signals of their presence—burnt out hearths where they gathered as families, still vivid wall paintings of their daily lives and dreams, withered flowers laid tenderly on the biers of their dead. It feels as if we have been here before ourselves.

This is the Cave of Life on the East of Eden. Here, all our experiences, even those some think they discovered in our time, have all been felt before—love’s deepest passion, middle age regret, the wonder of new life and old stars. Just beyond this everyday space there is a great aula in which our forebears stored their sorrow that we enter now to store our own. Unlike nuclear fuel that spends itself slowly over the centuries, human sadness never decays and sets ablaze the tinder of any cheap grace touched to it, of closure or counseling or New Age magic.

We have entered the great Mystery of the World as It Is, in whose luminous but cracked stained glass our sadness is but one panel. This is the religious mystery that, named or not, everybody knows, this Chinese box of mystery, this mirrored palace in which, losing ourselves, we find ourselves, and we are made prey by loving to time’s penalties of separation and loss. On 9/11, the protective shutters of this world were wrenched away and suddenly we could see the broken, wonderful World as It Is, this place just right for humans, by the fiery light of the event that has made mystics of us all.

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In a world that savors the new, an old devotion responds to our long autumn of mourning. The Stations of the Cross commemorate Jesus’ last journey across Jerusalem to Calvary, the Place of the Skull, where he would die on a cross, not thinking his kingship something to cling to, as Paul writes, but emptying himself, taking on the form of a slave, finding the fullness of his calling by embracing the same mystery of loss whose ashen taste lingers in the cup that we are still passing on, hand to hand, along a line, broken itself here and there, that trails back over the earth’s swell into night.

Since September 11, we have all been making this Via Crucis, but with renamed and relocated stations, or places of commemoration. Now we pause at dank and blasted subway stations, over the flowers on a thousand makeshift altars, at sidewalks streaked with candle wax and walls crowded with pictures of the missing; listen and hear Rachel’s grieving, Have you seen our daughter? Have you seen my wife? Have you seen our son?

For months, a scorched steel cross juts out of the Calvary of the smoking ruins, our Place of the Skull, where, as at Golgotha, amidst waiting families mothers long to cradle their lost sons and daughters in their arms again. We reach the final station, Ground Zero, now the fresh tomb cut in the rock in which we find the body of Jesus, and the bodies of all the dead, wrapped as tenderly as his, and borne out of the rubble in hushed liturgies of loss.

SEPARATION AND LOSS/TIME AND ETERNITY

This country of abundance has been plunged into the mystery of loss that changes us all. What, ask commentators not wise in the ways of the World as It Is, should religion do for us now? What answer can religion give to the solemn question of the moment? Some put it to God Himself, How, if you are a loving Father, could You allow this to happen? Let God be God, others insist, what we want is meaning: what meaning can religion find in our loss? Religion, however, does not answer questions but prompts us to ask deeper ones. Nor does religion tell us the meaning of our lives or of our deeds or who we are. That is our work.

Religion does not solve mystery as much as it opens us to the Mysterium Tremendum et Fascinans, the mystery beyond measure that holds us fast, the mystery that is also our destiny: that of experiencing rather than missing, guarding ourselves from, or fighting off, the imperfect glory of life itself. For the mirrors in its palace have two sides and we must acknowledge the image in both if we are to see ourselves whole. There is no defense against Life as It Is, no insurance to buy, nobody to sue when its course displeases us. And we feel alive only when we accept Love as It Is, embedded with every possibility of loss, leaving us ever at risk. God is not on trial in our lives, we are.

The Stations of the Cross recreate a universe of loss parallel to our own. Consigned to musty wall space in most churches and neglected, except in the interval of Lent, they speak freshly to our season of loss. They track the mystery of loss that finally overtakes Jesus to dissolve his work, his burgeoning movement, and his own physical existence, this Mysterium Tremendum et Fascinans, this loss that completes rather than destroys his life. This longstanding devotion, part pilgrimage and part prayer, steeps those who make it in this mystery that is seeded by another commonplace mystery, that of time itself.

This journey of prayer and remembrance, rooted in times lost and gone, retains its grace, transcending time by bearing that scarred chalice, that Grail of the Sacrament of all our human loss and sorrow. These meditations reflect incidents in the last hours of Christ’s life but they symbolize the incidents in our own human book of days. They attune us to the eternal whose pangs we feel in time, in the plangent longing of Spring, in the yearning that is the lining of our separations, in hungering to lose ourselves in those we love, in our doomed wish to capture the quicksilver beauty of passing days, and in our ache to hold on to each other just as we are in this world just as it is, in this now that, named, is no