Paul Janensch: Why My Former Bishop — Cardinal Sean Patrick O'Malley — Should Be the Next Pope
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Paul Janensch, Vero Beach, was a newspaper editor and taught journalism at Quinnipiac University. His Treasure Coast Essay can be heard at 7:20 a.m. and 7:59 p.m. Mondays at WQCS, 88.9 FM. I hope Cardinal Sean Patrick O’Malley is elected pope, and not just because he once was the bishop of the Palm Beach diocese, which includes the Treasure Coast. O’Malley, now the archbishop of Boston, is just what the Catholic Church needs at this time. He’s a good listener and a good communicator. He dealt effectively with messes left by sexually abusive priests. He cares about people. He’s theologically orthodox, preaching against abortion. That should please conservatives. He also has an open mind and seems in tune with the Second Vatican Council, convened 50 years ago by Pope John XXIII to engage the church with the modern world. That should please progressives. As the cardinals gathered in Rome, O’Malley was mentioned in the Italian press as a “papabile” — or possible pope. He and Cardinal Daniel Di Nardo, archbishop of Galveston-Houston, held daily press briefings at the North American College in Rome. They answered questions about the protocol of electing a pope, making it clear they could not violate their oath of secrecy about the deliberations under way. The briefings were canceled after leaks from the cardinals’ closed-door proceedings appeared in Italian newspapers. I am a Mass-attending Catholic, educated by Dominican sisters and Jesuit fathers, who is unhappy with the church’s hierarchy. Most of the archbishops and bishops seem obsessed with sins of the flesh committed by the laity, including sex with contraceptives. Yet some of them covered up the molesting of minors by priests they supervised. O’Malley, 68, was born in Lakewood, Ohio. He joined the Capuchin order, an offshoot of the Franciscans known for service to the poor. As a Capuchin friar, he wears sandals and a plain brown cassock. He has a full white beard. He is fluent in Spanish, Portuguese and Creole, the languages of heavily-Catholic Latin America. As a priest in Washington, D.C., he ministered to Latinos and founded the first Spanish-language newspaper in that area. He served as a bishop of St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands, then was made bishop of the Fall River, Mass., diocese, which had been devastated by revelations in The Boston Globe of the Rev. John Porter’s sexual abuse of minors. O’Malley listened to victims and reached settlements with them. He required everyone who worked for the diocese, from priests to parish volunteers, to take training in the prevention of sexual abuse. His program became a model for other dioceses across the country. In 2002, O’Malley was called to the Palm Beach diocese, where he followed two bishops who had resigned in succession — one for sexually molesting five boys early in his career as a priest and the other for covering up sexual abuses. O’Malley stayed only eight months before being assigned to the archdiocese of Boston, succeeding Cardinal Bernard Law, who had covered up sexual abuse by Porter and other priests, moving them from parish to parish without saying why they were transferred. Law was reassigned to a prestigious position in Rome. O’Malley did in Boston what he had done in Fall River. His work so impressed Pope Benedict XVI that he was sent to the archdiocese of Dublin to investigate the sexual abuse scandal there. O’Malley is a long shot. The cardinals are undoubtedly reluctant to elect a pope from the United States, the world’s pre-eminent secular power. But I pray that when the white smoke goes up and the world is told “Habemus papam!” (“We have a pope!”), the man on the balcony is the bearded friar who briefly was our shepherd in the diocese of Palm Beach.
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