Word: bernardine
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Seminary in Baltimore. Ordained in 1952, he rose rapidly to responsibility, and was consecrated bishop in 1966 as auxiliary to Atlanta Archbishop Paul Hallinan. Two years later, on Hallinan's recommendation, NCCB President Dearden picked Bernardin as general secretary of the hierarchy's staff in Washington, a job that made him well known among U.S. bishops...
Pope Paul named Bernardin Archbishop of Cincinnati in 1972. He has headed the 19-county archdiocese and its 511,000 Catholics with remarkable aplomb, steering a hazardous course between the church's sometimes apoplectic right and its sometimes radical left. For example, he has left the choice of religious curriculum-often a source of bitter quarrels between liberals and conservatives-to individual parishes...
Serious Talk. Yet Bernardin can and does intervene when he deems it necessary. He recently banned from the diocesan high schools a text called Love, Sex and Marriage because he judged it to contain doctrinal error-an act hailed by the ultraconservative national weekly The Wanderer. On the other hand, Bernardin offended many supporters of financially strapped parochial schools when he endorsed a tax increase for the distressed public schools. But he effectively tempers criticism of such decisions by carefully hearing all parties to the controversies and, when he disagrees, calmly explaining his own position...
Some who otherwise support Bernardin wonder whether his cautious decision making and cultivation of approval may not be signs of overweening ambition. His defenders contend that if the archbishop is ambitious, his zeal is for the welfare of his church, not himself. An almost compulsive worker, Bernardin rises at 6 a.m. to put in a 17-hour day of diocesan business and prayer. But his work is not all done at a desk: he enjoys spending many hours in informal but often serious talk with his fellow clergy and lay people...
...Bernardin's diligence and powers of conciliation will be sorely tested during his three years in national office. As two pessimistic reports to the bishops' conference last week indicated, the church is embattled both from within and without. One of the two appraisals came from Jesuit Sociologist John L. Thomas, who warned the bishops that today's technological society in the U.S. is "bereft of any convincing sense of ultimate purpose or rooted moral belief." Moreover, in the mobile U.S. society, Catholics have lost much of their comforting old ethnic solidarity. The changes in the church that...