De mortuis nihil nisi
bonum (of
the dead, [speak] nothing unless it is good) has always been one of my favorite
Latin aphorisms but it would put us historians out of business. It would also permit the ideologues to
totally distort the truth about the past, something that a wide variety of the
krazy spectrum—from the ‘Tea-Party’ folk in politics to the Latin Massers in
the Church—do well enough already with their various rewrites of history,
secular and religious.
And
today Cardinal Edward Egan, former Archbishop of New York, is laid to
rest. The television is replete with a
variety of people ranging from the policeman who stands in front of the
Cardinal’s residence on Madison Avenue to a Knight of Malta resplendent in the
cowl of his Order saying what a warm and kind man His late Eminence was. De
mortuis nihil nisi bounum is about selective memory. History needs to be more rounded.
There
are good things one could say about the Cardinal. Edward Egan was not a bad man
and even if he were, everyone has something
good that can be said about them. His
family testified to his love for them and his love for the people of New
York. Love he may have had but he
certainly was not one to emote in public or even show affection. He
certainly was there for the people of New York in the aftermath of 9/11 and,
while not a warm man, he was dutiful in personally performing the funeral rites
of many and visiting many more in hospitals.
He
was a great money man. And despite all
our liberal “disdain” of filthy lucre, the fact is the Church needs money to
accomplish its mission. On the one hand,
Cardinal Egan was a great fund-raiser and, on the other, he could tighten a
budget in a way that Scott Walker could only envy—and, unfortunately, too often
with the same amount of human suffering of which the good Governor is proud of
in the great State of Denial, I mean Wisconsin.
Egan was more successful in reaching solvency for the Diocese of
Bridgeport when he was bishop there than he was in New York, but New York’s
problems were much greater and, on the bottom line, he didn’t do bad for New
York from the fiscal perspective. He was
slow to close underpeopled churches which has left headaches for his successor
but which somewhat modulated his unpopularity among those parishioners whose
churches he kept open.
He
also was a staunch promoter of priestly vocations though the quality of men he
attracted to his seminary and the “reforms” he enacted at the seminary in
Yonkers (Saint Joseph’s, Dunwoodie) are not universally admired. One would have to say that the Jury is still
out on those questions. He certainly
didn’t anticipate the “Francis Model,” though the worst system will still
produce some good priests and the best system some rotten apples. He also missed Francis’ boat when it came to
providing a retirement residence; let’s just say that it wasn’t a downward move
when the left the official Archbishop’s residence on Madison Avenue for his new
retirement digs.
He
was a staunch defender of the unborn but also a proponent of interpreting canon
915 to exclude those in public life who saw their public duties
differently. He instructed then Mayor
Rudolf Giuliani not to receive Holy Communion and was furious when the Mayor
received Communion at Pope Benedict’s New York Mass in April 2008, issuing a
public rebuke of the Mayor over the matter.
Both
as Bishop of Bridgeport and Archbishop of New York, Egan had somewhat of a
checkered history when it came to the issues of reporting clerical sexual
abuse. His position in Bridgeport was
that there should be an internal hearing to determine the credibility of the
accusation before the individual was reported to the civil authorities lest the
priest be the victim of unfounded allegations.
Priests were grateful for this protection from potentially false or
ill-motivated claims but it was in violation of the civil law. In 2002 he gave an apology saying: "If
in hindsight we also discover that mistakes may have been made as regards
prompt removal of priests and assistance to victims, I am deeply
sorry." However he was later to
retract this apology saying “I never should have said that…I don’t think we did
anything wrong.”
In New York the Cardinal lost the confidence of many of his
priests and an anonymous letter from the priests was circulated, published, and
sent on to Rome saying “During the last six years, the Cardinal’s relations with the Priests
of New York have been defined by dishonesty, deception, disinterest and
disregard.” The writers of the
letter said they had to remain anonymous, at least as regards the published
letter, because of Egan’s “vindictive” nature.
Cardinal Egan’s episcopacy needs be measured by the fact that
like so many of the Bishops appointed during the John Paul years, he was the
wrong sort of man to be a bishop. Like
his best friend and soul-mate, John Richard Keating, a fellow Chicagoan and
fellow Canon Lawyer, Egan had the heart of a bureaucrat, not a shepherd. The Church needs bureaucrats; it is—among
other things—a bureaucracy. But it is
not at its heart a bureaucracy and it shouldn’t have bureaucrats at its
heart—that is, in the ministry and office of Bishop. This isn’t to say that Edward Egan wasn’t a
good man, or even—in his own way and according to his own gifts—a good
priest. He just wasn’t what the Church
needs. Conservative though he was, he was
no right-winger. He had no interest in
validating the “Old Rites,” but then he had little or no interest in the “New
Rite” either. The slovenliness of his
funeral rites were appropriate to his own liturgical style. He was a lawyer, a money-man, a person
dedicated to making the system run as efficiently as possible. He did that well and as I wrote above, we
need those sort of persons around—on the chancery staff—but not necessarily
among the ordained and certainly not with miter and crosier. John Paul gave us some good bishops but
mostly corporation men like Egan.
Benedict gave us brighter men, men who could think, but not necessarily braver
men or holier men. Benedict’s bishops
(for the most part), like those of his predecessor, were climbers. Every so often an O’Malley or a Curlin or a
Morneau got snuck in, but over the last thirty-five years for the most part we
got our Cordileone and Lori and Finn and Morlino and Dewayne. It will take some time to clear them out and
hopefully we will in the future receive more bishops like Blase Cupich or
Christopher Coyne or Robert McElroy. In
the meantime, eternal rest to Edward Egan.
He may not have been the best we could have hoped for, but neither was
he the worst. While I am not an admirer,
I did think that singing the Dies Irae
as he was carried to his crypt was more than a bit harsh. He was as good a man as he was able. God be good to him. God be good to us
all.
