John Cardinal O'Connor, the arch-bishop of New York, died last week at the age of 80, after suffering for several months from a brain tumor. The number of grieving memorials published about the man has been overwhelming, but no more than he deserved. Even longtime opponents like Mario Cuomo have taken the opportunity to acknowledge his wit and his charity, and those who agree with his strong public stands on issues such as abortion have been nearly inconsolable at his loss.
It is true that some conservatives' admiration for O'Connor was not unalloyed with doubts. A strong supporter of unions (his father was a gold-leaf painter and union activist who used to read aloud to his children in the evenings from Catholic labor tracts), he never had the support of Wall Street that his predecessor, Terence Cardinal Cooke, enjoyed. Though he fought against the destruction of poor neighborhoods wrought by misguided welfare measures such as Aid to Families with Dependent Children, he fought as well to convince his flock of the moral necessity for other and better kinds of government programs. His support for immigration and opposition to the death penalty left him at odds with New York police unions and other historically Catholic organizations in New York's complicated civic life.
He took these stands from conviction, however, and they won him no support from either the mainstream media or radical leftists. Indeed, on abortion and homosexuality, the issues with which Cardinal O'Connor became most identified, it was hard to tell much difference between the mainstream media and radical leftists in New York. In 1989, in as open a demonstration of anti-Catholicism as America had seen in a hundred years, homosexual activists chained themselves to pews, profaned the Host, and pelted mass-goers with condoms during services at St. Patrick's Cathedral -- with the overwhelming support of the New York press. O'Connor held firm, however, as he had when he won his bitter battle against Mayor Ed Koch's edict that church organizations provide benefits to the partners of homosexual employees. It was typical of O'Connor that he and Koch became friends during the fight (they would later co-author a book), just as it was typical that he never publicized his visits to Catholic hospitals to minister to AIDS patients for use in his political battles.
There used to be thousands of Irish Catholics, in both politics and the Church, with O'Connor's combination of old-fashioned, blue-collar political liberalism and old-fashioned, blue-collar social conservatism. In fact, through the 1960s, that combination was nearly the definition of an American Irish Catholic. But by the time O'Connor came to New York in 1984, those days seemed to be gone.
Cardinal O'Connor, however, refused either to accept the apparent decline of Catholicism or to live on old glories. He fought, inside the Church and outside, for the teachings of John Paul II, for theological consistency, for the importance of his vision of care for the poor and care for the moral state of America. The depth of sorrow at his death last Wednesday night suggests he may have succeeded more than would have seemed possible in 1983, and that he was more a shaper of the future than a throwback to the past.