P.O. Box 53055    
Los Angeles, CA 90053   

GAINING STRENGTH FROM THE STORM

People called him “the boy bishop” when he received that high title at the very young age of 38. Later, at age 68, he was to receive the informal name, “America’s senior cardinal.” Joseph Bernardin was the much-beloved archbishop of Chicago and there were a lot of Catholics who thought that he might well become the first American pope someday.

We have a marvelous book here in our offices, written by a friend of the cardinal, Eugene Kennedy. The two men took such different paths: Bernardin moving up through the ranks, adding more and more influence to his resumé, while Kennedy, once a fellow priest, eventually left the priesthood in order to marry. And Kennedy, in this moving biography, entitled My Brother Joseph, speaks in awe of the quiet strength Bernardin possessed.

“I would learn at close range [over 30 years], when nobody else was looking, how profoundly manly he was,” Kennedy writes, “in a gentle, nonargumentative style that covered the tensile strength of his character.”

Kennedy found out firsthand about that “tensile strength” — meaning strength that can meet stress and tension, strength that can bend but not break. When he wanted to leave the Catholic priesthood to marry his “Sally,” Dr. Sara Charles, the woman he had fallen in love with, he needed Joseph Bernardin to help with the formal church process of laicization, the petitions needed to leave his priesthood vows. And Joseph kindly said that he would help within the limits of his office. But it would be complicated; it could take a long time, and there were certainly political issues involved.

Then Kennedy kind of leaned into him with a hard, hard request. “You could marry us,” he said — a request that would be plainly outside the bounds of church law. And Kennedy writes in the book:

“I had forced him into harm’s way in that place where real friendship collided with sworn duty.”

And after just a moment, this quiet strong man shook his head. “I can’t do that. Even if I wanted to, I can’t do that.” And he explained that he had a higher loyalty, to his church and to its teachings.

Well, friend, even as a Protestant Christian, I salute people who are faithful to what they feel are the doctrines and creeds of their chosen church family. But let me quickly skip ahead to the story which brings us today’s lesson. First, he endured a public scandal when people accused him of helping to overthrow his predecessor, Cardinal Cody. Then the bigger bombshell: on a November 12, 1993, in U.S. District Court, Southern District of Ohio, Western Division, Case #0-1-93-0784 was filed on behalf of a plaintiff named Steven Cook, who alleged that Cardinal Joseph Bernardin had sexually abused him while Steven was a minor.

Well, you might recall the story because it kind of rocked the nation for a while. The archbishop of Chicago? Molesting a young troubled man, just a teenager?

We’ve told bits of this story before: how Cardinal Bernardin responded with honest, forthright Christian love. How he prayed his way through the crisis. How he patiently answered insulting questions from reporters. How he actually sat down and wrote a personal letter to the very man who was accusing him: Steven Cook.

“You must be suffering a great deal,” he wrote. “The idea came to me yesterday morning that it would be a good thing if I visited with you personally. The purpose of the visit would be strictly pastoral — to show my concern for you and to pray with you.”

The media circus lasted more than three months — 108 days to be exact — before Steven Cook recanted the charges he had made in court. None of it had been true . . . and Bernardin stepped in front of the microphones in Chicago and said to the reporters: “Deo gratias — thanks be to God.”

Now, think about something with me. Because what an opportunity this could have been for one of the major grudges of all time to be birthed. A false accusation. Public scrutiny: Kennedy later told his friend Joseph that he was very likely “the most investigated man in America, and the man with the cleanest slate — nobody had been able to find anything against him.” Bernardin could certainly have been forgiven if he had boiled over, harbored hatred for Steven Cook and for the greedy lawyer, Steven Rubino, and the rogue priest, Charles Fiore, who helped fan the flames. But no. No grudge. No resentment. No nursing the wounds. Nothing but prayer and kindness and honesty.

The soundbite that means so much to me, though, is this.

“Joseph accepted the storm,” Kennedy writes, “as part of what God asked him to experience as a condition of his service to the Church.” Now notice this – and I’ll explain in a moment. “He did not understand what Providence was preparing him for — that became clear . . . later — but he made the turmoil the fundament of his spiritual life instead of cursing the unfairness of its focus on him. He began each day now with an hour of prayer, and his calmness flowed from the sure sense he had of giving himself over to God’s will, no matter what it was.”

Now, what’s this all about? About a year later, Joseph Bernardin was hit with pancreatic cancer. Fast-growing pancreatic cancer. No matter what they did — and the doctors did suggest some hopeful things — it would be this cancer which would end his life. Kennedy writes:

“It seemed so unfair — as guileful as this disease that had entered him like an evil spirit — that Joseph, who had just come through the worst of tests, should have crashed through the paper-veiled hoop of a cruel circus only to find death, sharp of claw and uncaged, waiting for him.”

And two years later, on November 14, 1996, Bernardin — My Brother Joseph — was gone.

But friend, here’s what this all means to us today. A situation comes along which is so unfair. It is! It’s “in your face” unfair! And you deal every day, every hour, with the injustice of it all: how that other person gets away with hurting you, how they get the blessings you deserve, while you end up with the scorn that should be applied to them. So you’re tempted to hold a grudge, to nurse your hurt feelings, to think of ways to get revenge. Of course you do. We all want to respond that way.

But what a picture we find in this quiet story, where a man of God looks at the TV cameras, and at the pictures of him splashed all over the front pages of every major newspaper — filled with lies — and says to himself: “What is Providence preparing me for? What does God want me to learn? Why is heaven allowing me to receive this spiritual discipline?”

I know of people who have enjoyed good, prosperous, well-ordered lives . . . except for this one certain person in their sphere. One person who hurts them. One person whose behavior always troubles their soul. One person who is unfair and insensitive. And for years they simply have to deal with it: either in the workplace, or in the church, or in the family. And instead of cursing and fretting and allowing that grudge to occupy an expensive bed in the UrgentCare center of their mind, they simply ask God in their prayers: “Father, what is it You want me to learn from this? I’m ready to sit at Your feet and be instructed through this experience. Open my mind up to discover and develop the character traits — patience, prayer, forgiveness, a heart to understand others, whatever — that You see I still need more help to fine-tune.”

And sometimes it’s simply a case of toughening up. Letting those boisterous waves roll against you while you try to stand against the currents of cruelty and accusation. Like Bernardin, you find yourself praying an hour a day now, instead of for five minutes. You make this “turmoil the fundament of” your spiritual life.

Job got there, when he finally said about God:

“Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him.”

Peter got there, after having the trials of his walking-on-water failure — speaking of boisterous waves – and his denial of Jesus finally prepare him for the real battles that faced him in the early Christian church. Later, in his first epistle, he wrote this:

“In this [God’s inheritance for us] you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials. These have come so that your faith — of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire — may be proved genuine and may result in praise, glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed.”

C. S. Lewis, in writing to that American woman whose middle name seemed to be Grudge, shares this encouragement:

“It is very hard to believe that all one’s indignation is simply bad: but I suppose one must stick to the text ‘The wrath of man worketh not the righteousness of God.’ I suppose one must keep on remembering that there is always something deeply wrong inside with a man so bad as this.” Now notice this close: “For yourself I can only hope — and passages in your letter confirm my hope — that through all this you are being brought closer to God than you could have otherwise.”

Friend, wouldn’t you like to be closer to God? To have — as Joseph Bernardin did — that quiet, “tensile strength”? Sometimes we only get strength to stand against the wind . . . when there is wind.