Wisdom of the Aged made simple

An American man qualifies for full Social Security benefits on his 65th birthday. Few know that after 20 years he qualifies for Unsocial Security benefits: Whatever he remembers about long-ago sports events, political arguments and his appeal to females, is good enough; it is his right to be as goofy as though he were a member of Congress.

Radio talk shows are credited with inventing the seven-second delay in broadcasting comments by callers who might be creative in the use of license-busting words of four letters and up. Actually this emulates the long-standing seven-second delay in what is said to an octogenarian and the moment the octogenarian hears it, sometimes called the in-one-ear-out-the-other syndrome. That’s why you know so few 80-year-olds named Speedy.

Dizzier than thou: MSA updated

Striking me lightly on the back of my head is beyond Tom’s talent for games. He’s more likely to purr and push his furry head up for stroking, so when I’m home alone with my cat and feel that smack on the head I know what it is. My OPCA/MSA is acting up again, swinging an invisible baseball bat and stirring a swirl of dizziness like home plate dust on a windy day.

OPCA — olivopontocerebellar atrophy — has recently cut back, like Herbert Hoover hacking at a welfare budget, in the time it allows me to stand before my head starts to spin in synch with the swaying in my legs.

This has nothing to do with heights, even though my canes have gotten half an inch longer than they used to be. Either that, or I’m half an inch shorter. OPCA thought of an incredible shrinking man, and the equal opportunity shrinking woman, before Hollywood did.

Whoever asked me to write about these phases of OPCA, the progressions of a progressive disease, has probably been forgiven, although here I am, still writing updates.

OPCA is hitting below the eyebrows, at squint level. For more than 80 years I’ve been reading without ever thinking about reading. The whole point of reading is to slide into the writer’s dimension without conscious focusing, so something gets lost when the act of reading swings from automatic to stick shift.

This may be accompanied by forgetting what’s being read while it is being read, sort of in one eye and out the other. OPCA does not afflict all of its victims with identical symptoms and it does not progress at one speed for all. It is about eight years after my diagnosis, progressing from cane to rollator, that the supermarket has now become formidable.I have a new game, which is to proofread whatever I write via keyboard, inserting the letter “a” wherever it is missing. The little finger on my left hand asserts its OPCA independence by only pretending to strike the “a” key while I’m typing.

So, if you have this mysterious OPCA brainwarp, or if you’re a caregiver, this is my newest report to you. For me the best part is that I’m able to write. Now I know that, when necessary, nine fingers will do the work of ten. I know that sitting up is better than falling down, and that praying for each other is better than going it alone.

Vatican whispers fade as time goes by

In photo at right, Cardinal Cody kneels between two popes -- John Paul I and John Paul II, in Rome on Sept. 3, 1978.




I held my breath while those courageous Chilean miners were squeezed one by one into a narrow tube for an uncertain ascent through solid rock. Tight spaces take my breath away, a claustrophobia that makes a closed MRI tube fearsome.

Tight situations can whip up an instant stampede in the imagination, a confused and reckless response to a jammed elevator or a tightening throat, even a burst of unwelcome memories like a sewer backing up.

Unwelcome memories are being described by victims of clerical abuse all over the world, to the annoyance of some church leaders. Until recently, such things were local. The faithful tended not to believe an accusation if they heard about it. Then came the Internet and cell phones and 24-hour news reports. Suddenly what had seemed local misbehavior was seen to be universal.

Not long after I was named director and the first editor in chief of the National Catholic News Service in 1972, a Catholic bishop was arrested on a drunk driving charge. That kind of news had been too delicate for coverage by a news agency owned by the conference of bishops. I reversed that policy, and the story was reported. There were angry complaints from some bishops and support from others, most notably support from the man who hired me, Bishop (later Cardinal) Joseph Bernardin.

Concealment of bad news was common in the church, as it was in business and government. One prominent Catholic editor said that his slogan was, “When in doubt, leave it out.” Some Catholic journalists saw their role as defending the institution, especially bishops. Others thought the Second Vatican Council triggered different expectations.

I’ve described elsewhere my employment by Cardinal John Cody of Chicago to help him write his autobiography. I interviewed him for hundreds of hours during a time when he was resisting a grand jury inquiry, refusing Vatican requests that he accept a post in the Roman curia or accept a coadjutor archbishop in Chicago, and rolling as the target of investigative reporting by a Chicago daily. It was a stunning, numbing experience to hear Cody threaten to “blow the lid” off the Holy See, where he had worked for years. It was breathtaking to be told that the pope had said Uncle, assuring Cody’s continued silence.

Cody was a product of pre-Vatican II Catholicism, when the common way to approach a bishop was to kiss his ring, when educated Catholics asked a bishop’s permission to read something listed on the Index of prohibited books. A lawsuit filed against the church could bring excommunication. Few Catholics challenged the notion that the church should be protected from scandal. There was little understanding of homosexuality, and priests who fooled around with boys were expected to shape up and ship out to a new assignment.

Most of our dinner guests at that time were priests and bishops. Some were gay, some were not. Few paid too much attention to our children, and when they did my wife and I made sure that nothing developed. We didn’t even consider making a public issue of it. When I was approached, usually during overnight events, I just backed off until Sally and I decided some decades ago that we had an obligation to report one cleric’s behavior. I told a bishop about it. After he had time to check it out, he invited me to meet with him. I felt caught in a whirlwind as the bishop began to speak: “On behalf of the Catholic Church I apologize to you...”

Sally was a leader in a church-sponsored group of gay men, all closet-dwellers in those days. She understood that most of them were attracted to other adults and had no interest in boys. She learned, too, that false accusations could destroy a person’s personal and professional life.

Maybe I was conditioned by my 1940s experience as police reporter for a daily newspaper, whose editor decided that there would be no stories about priests accused of “crimes against nature.”

When I took a course for catechism teachers around 1955, the ordained instructor said that gay penitents in the confessional were routinely forgiven, even when the confessor recognized them as regulars. Attitudes would change in the 1970s and beyond.

For a long time after Cody’s death I thought I would write the book, but not the way Cody had in mind. For one thing, I felt the caution of a reporter who knew that Cody was not given to being inconvenienced by truth. In addition, I liked the Cody who never missed Bob Hope on television, and thought I understood him. He was a pioneer in integrating schools when he was Archbishop of New Orleans. He was an early supporter of programs to help alcoholic priests.

I liked the Cody who encouraged me to buy a condo by writing a personal check as a loan to cover the down payment, but I knew he was not unlike business chiefs who use checkbooks to buy gratitude and influence. He was a sick man, and he denied that, too. His respected public relations counselor once told me that “the problem with Cardinal Cody is that there’s no Mrs. Cody.”

Around the time I turned 85, which was some years after I was diagnosed with a curious form of parkinsonism, I began to gag on memories of behavior and concealment inside the apparatus of the church. This was stirred by a burst of news reports about such events almost everywhere. When I look at my notes I can feel an emotional claustrophobia, a kind of memory choking that has no Heimlich maneuver.

It is the dizzy claustrophobia of OPCA/Multiple System Atrophy that keeps me from going to church, and not the chilling memories. I love the church, the clergy and religious, and many of the sermons. A painful side effect of triggered memories is that some friends misunderstand, thinking it is a rejection of them or of faith. The opposite is true. It is an affirmation of faith no matter what the obstacles may be.

Sometimes I think about those hermits who used to spend their time on top of poles in the desert, and I realize that although it is not my choice, it is okay to be an opca/msa hermit in a pleasant condo with computers, TV sets, radios, books and magazines, a microwave and a freezer, in frequent touch with children and grandchildren while friends include me in their prayers and emails.

I've been given needed time to blue pencil my own life, which like everyone else I began as an amateur, and try to correct some of the mistakes and to seek forgivness for them all. Having this opportunity proves God’s love. And gradual loss of memory proves God's mercy.

Termites in your brain?

This morning when I flicked into a web site for folks with ataxia, and their caregivers, I accidentally opened my registration page. I seldom look at it, and so I was surprised to be reminded that I had joined the online group on December 12, 2002.

Good lord. That was almost eight years ago, just a few months after Sally, my wife, passed on to wherever wonderful people spend eternity. Earlier that year Sally and Marie, my daughter, were with me when a gifted neurologist said I had olivopontocerebellar atrophy, known to its friends, if it has any friends, as OPCA. It is a form of Parkinsonism sometimes called multiple system atrophy, or MSA.

There are any number of online sites where people with curious ailments share their feelings with each other. The one I plugged into this morning showed that I’ve posted 1,049 separate messages there. Not long after I joined I wrote a little book about OPCA. What I wrote in that book, and in most of those messages, is out of date already. And OPCA is still a mystery, incurable, progressively destructive, like a swarm of termites making themselves at home in a brain.

While I was looking at that 2002 posting I thought about how much I’ve learned about OPCA since them.

In 2002 I could still drive my grandkids to karate lessons and cheer them on in their school plays and games. I could still go to church, to a movie, to a ball game, to the library and the mall. I could board a train for Chicago and walk around the Loop with nothing more than a cane. I could walk the dog, use a broom without wobbling, talk on the phone without mumbling or gasping, get up from a chair without working out a strategy, remember my social security number and read a book for as long as I liked without falling asleep, losing my place or dropping the book.

The good part is that I remember thousands of those happy times with family and friends. I can relive the joys at any time. I have friends I would not know except for OPCA in our lives. I’ve known the patient love of my children and their children and countless friends, and the loving courtesies of strangers.

I’m not sure what it means, but God, who is Love, is there, inside that OPCA. Someday there will be a cure for OPCA, but God will still be there. I acknowledge with a smile that there’s no cure for God.

Washington's most capable leader

It was at Bishop John Wright’s home in Pittsburgh that I met a personable young man about the time of his ordination to the priesthood. Now that man, still young in looks and enthusiasm as he observes his 70th birthday November 12, has been named a cardinal by Pope Benedict XVI. Donald W. Wuerl was already the Archbishop of Washington.

Wuerl was a valued assistant to Bishop Wright in his native Pittsburgh. When Wright was given the red hat and made head of the Vatican’s Sacred Congregation for the Clergy, Fr. Wuerl accompanied him as secretary. He become acquainted with every aspect of church leadership, even as he wrote books and articles and looked after an ailing boss.

Cardinal Wright was a long-time friend. When he was Bishop of Worcester, Mass., he introduced me to the managing editor of The Worcester Telegram. Frank Murphy then hired me as a copy editor. Eventually Wright became the Bishop of Pittsburgh, taking with him the editor of Worcester’s diocesan newspaper, Jack Deedy. After Deedy resigned from the Pittsburgh diocesan paper to join Commonweal, Wright phoned me from a Trappist monastery he was visiting to offer me the Pittsburgh job. It was an exciting prospect. I told Bishop Wright that he would have to ask Lawrence Cardinal Shehan, my boss at the time, to release me from a contract. Shehan said No.

In 1968, when Wuerl was a member of the committee sponsoring a Pax Romana symposium in Pittsburgh, I was invited (yikes!) to be a reactor to the Jesuit theologian Fr. Bernard Lonergan and the Jesuit philosopher Fr. Martin D’Arcy.

During the years that followed I often spoke with Wuerl during visits with Wright in Rome and even in Baltimore. After Wright’s death Wuerl came to dinner at my home in Chicago, bringing the Cardinal’s red zuchetta for my son, John Wright Wall. Afterward my daughter, Marie, a college student at the time, said she had never met a priest who was so enthusiastic about priesthood.

It was like a satisfying chapter in a novel when Wuerl became the Bishop of Pittsburgh, the resident of that home where mentoring mattered.

In many ways Cardinal Wuerl reminds me of the late Joseph Cardinal Bernardin, whose position as general secretary of the U.S. bishops’ conference gave him a broad view of church and opened friendships in high places. These are probably the two Americans best-prepared by experience and single-minded devotion to lead the entire church.

Separation of church and sex still elusive

It would not be Christian to hold Jesus responsible for organizing the church we read about in headlines. Catholics are not alone in believing that the church was founded by Jesus, even though he cautioned that "by their fruits you shall know them.” [Matthew 7:16] Jesus should not be known by those apples. The church Jesus founded is not the one that owns a bank, but the one that sent agents out with “no purse, no wallet, no shoes.” [Luke 10:4]

Actual churches are run by humans who want to honor God and receive God’s blessings. They keep love circulating. They feed people who have all kinds of hungers, they care for the sick and frail, they encourage worship of and they educate the young.

Personal failures by the devout, especially clergy, are more shocking, if not as entertaining, as the moral collapse of athletes or public officials. In the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago, members of three lay groups called attention to these figures: Some 256 of approximately 400 parishes in that archdiocese have, at some time, been served by an accused pedophile priest. The groups were Voice of the Faithful (VOTF), African American Advocates of Victims of Clergy Sexual Abuse, and Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests (SNAP).

All of nature, especially human nature, is slow to change. It is unreasonable to assume that pedophile clergy appeared for the first time around 1940. Before that there were no television shows, no computers, no Internet, no cell phones. The biggest threat to law and decorum in the schools was chewing gum and spitballs catapulted from rubber bands. It was an era of understatement.

Victims of priestly predators tended not to be believed if they talked about it. Church authorities celebrated privacy, and sexually promiscuous clerics did not turn each other in. Newspapers had little to say about—you know—the S word. The editor of one daily I worked for told police reporters not to write about the arrest of priests for what was called crimes against nature.

It did not start in 1940. These activities have very likely been constant during all of the Christian centuries and, as scripture indicates, during pre-Christian times as well.

Having been hired by the late Cardinal John Cody to ghost-write his autobiography, I recall that one of his last efforts before his death was to prevent disclosure of a scandal that crossed state lines. He spoke freely to me for hundreds of hours about the most sensitive issues, but he did not want to talk about that one. I wrote quite a different kind of book about his successor, called The Spirit of Cardinal Bernardin, a survey of Joseph Bernardin’s thinking on religion and public life. In common with all of the bishops I worked with at the time, Cardinal Bernardin understood himself to be a pastor and brother to his priests.

Some wonder how cardinals, archbishops, bishops, priests, deacons, religious and laity reconcile repeated scandalous actions with their belief that defying God’s commands brings eternal punishment in hell. Why does a cardinal engage in sex with a man on a Sunday afternoon after preaching what his church teaches about sex and celibacy. How can he risk eternal punishment over and over? What does this say about his belief?

Who cares about religion when a new sex poll is out?

I was very close to a woman who had been superintendent of a Methodist Episcopal church long ago, and knew that she read the Bible with total respect. She was proud of a statue of St. Francis in her garden, and taken aback when a fundamentalist Baptist neighbor denounced it. “What’s wrong with you,” the lady said, “don’t you know St. Francis is in the Bible?” Her neighbor did not question that, but still thought it was being misused by the papists.

Those two women came to mind when I read about a new poll, which disclosed a lack of religious expertise in today’s population. People by the hundreds of millions hear the Bible quoted in sermons and novels, and even read it once in a while. Who knows how many of them expect to find the Gospel of St. Francis in there somewhere? The poll probably has its facts right, without taking note of folks who identify with principles of the Bible, even though they are as confused about chapter and verse as they are about geometry. They believe in math and religion, but would flunk a test in either.

Interest in how many religious facts are understood by believers is already being shoved aside by a new report on human sexuality.