Roman Catholics: The Unlikely Cardinal

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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 (a translator relayed his words in Spanish). "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 (particularly Red Chinese) 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."