A man's final acts can tell much about him, especially when he knows he soon will die. Upon learning of his pancreatic cancer, knowing the odds that it would kill him, Cardinal Joseph Bernardin could have retired for health reasons. He could have moved to a retreat center or to a climate milder than Chicago's. Instead, he delegated all but the most crucial administrative tasks and refocused his priestly ministry. He told his cabinet of advisers that he had a new priority: "to spend time with the sick and the troubled."

During his final year he became, in his words, the "unofficial chaplain" to Chicago cancer patients. In a 1995 interview with his friend and biographer, Eugene Kennedy, the cardinal described how people responded when he visited the wake of a young man who had died tragically: "As I arrived and when I left," Bernardin said, "people slipped me notes with the names of friends and relatives suffering from cancer. I'm trying to get in touch with these people. Today I've already made nine calls to talk with the sick. I've also sent out several other notes. I've been in touch with people of all ages and backgrounds." Kennedy likened it to the lives of the saints, how people spontaneously sought out the prayers, guidance, help, any proximity to those they considered holy. Cardinal Bernardin kept up that ministry until he was too sick to continue.

In his final year he devoted much time to organizing the Catholic Common Ground Project, hoping to leave behind a way for Catholics to come together and work out their differences while standing on the bedrock of their common faith.

He visited his mother daily in her nursing home.

He finished the manuscript for The Gift of Peace as well as a number of other smaller writing projects, including the Afterword to a collection of his many writings and speeches since 1983 on Jewish-Catholic relations.

He led, during his final year, a U.S. bishops' committee figuring out how to reorganize and streamline the workings of the 400-member national body.

He joined a Washington, D.C., protest against partial-birth abortion.

He visited and prayed with a prisoner on Death Row.

He flew to Italy to discuss business with the pope and to visit his immigrant-parents' families.

His final public act was writing a "friend of the court" letter to the U.S. Supreme Court, promoting the pro-life effort against physician-assisted suicide. "There can be no such thing as a 'right to assisted suicide,'" Bernardin wrote, "because there can be no legal and moral order which tolerates the killing of innocent human life...." And he wrote, "I am at the end of my earthly life....[A]s one who is dying I have especially come to appreciate the gift of life....I urge the court not to create any right to assisted suicide."

Instead, Cardinal Bernardin sought to embrace death as a natural part of life. In the spirit of St. Francis, to whom he had deep devotion, he stood in front of TV cameras and called death his friend. World-renowned advice columnist Ann Landers was among the few of his closest friends and family called to his bedside at the end: "He somehow made us all less afraid to die," she wrote. Before he slipped into a coma, he received phone calls of farewell both from Pope John Paul II and from President Bill Clinton. -The St. Anthony Messenger

-- Veritas (Schenden@5starmail.com), May 15, 2004

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Movin' on Up!

-- Veritas (Schenden@5starmail.com), May 15, 2004.