Word: bernardine
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Joseph Cardinal Bernardin sits in his fourth-floor office at the Chicago archdiocese two days after a suit against him alleging sexual abuse has been withdrawn. He has got calls from the Pope and the First Lady on his red phone, the only dash of color in the severely plain room. He turns away from his marble conference table to point at the window he looked out on the day before the suit was filed last November. He remembers seeing a few reporters huddled below near the canopy of the Barclay hotel, peering up at his office. Every time...
...available for an exclusive CNN interview. Sure enough, when the suit was filed the next day, Nov. 12, CNN aired the interview with Cook, who said he had repressed the memory that the Cardinal had had sex with him when he was a teenage pre-seminarian in the 1970s. Bernardin was given time by CNN later in the day for his own press conference. But that fueled rather than cooled the story...
...reporting would have shown the charges to be suspect. Repressed memory is controversial to begin with, and the hypnotist who jogged Cook's memory is in the graphic-arts business and is not a licensed psychologist. The evidence was flimsy. There was no telltale inscription in a book Bernardin was supposed to have given him, and Cook's photo of the two of them was a group graduation photo, one of thousands Bernardin...
...BERNARDIN GANTIN, above, 71, Benin...
Chicago's Cardinal Bernardin got through a separate motion making the paper the basis for "further study and dialogue," most notably on the church's opposition to women priests, which was endorsed in the rejected text. Bernardin backs the ban but said candidly that it is "generally not well understood or accepted" and that a more persuasive case must be made. Liberal lobbies hailed these developments. The upshot is that, contrary to Vatican wishes, the U.S. bishops have made women's ordination subject to ongoing debate...