By Judie Brown
Cardinal John O’Connor (1920-2000) was inspiring, challenging, controversial, and, for us, a dear friend. He was the first Catholic prelate to make a valiant effort to bring unity to the pro-life movement and a master of peaceful negotiation, even though one wonders how it could be possible for those committed to defending life to ever have a disagreement!
We say that in jest, of course, because where there are more than two people involved in anything, there will be different ways of dealing with a situation. Cardinal O’Connor was well aware of that, having served in the military and having come up through the ranks with other human beings. But he sincerely believed that defending life was more than an obligation, it was a vocation.
As he once said, “It is my very sincere prayer that if I live for a week, if I live for 20 years, my last breath will be in support of the sacredness of every human life.”
For him, that was not a shallow platitude. It was at the core of everything he did as leader of the largest archdiocese in the United States. He believed so strongly in the sanctity of life that he founded the Sisters of Life—an order of nuns to minister to women and their preborn children, to provide them with assistance, and to bring them closer to Christ. The Sisters of Life site recalls:
Cardinal John O’Connor, a navy chaplain-become-archbishop of New York, paid a visit to the Dachau concentration camp in Germany, where thousands of people had been tortured and killed during the Second World War. As he placed his hands into the semicircular red brick ovens, he said he had a profound spiritual experience in which he felt the intermingled ashes of Christian and Jew, rabbi and priest. Pierced to the heart, he cried out: “My God! How can human beings do this to other human beings?” In that moment, he made a promise: to do everything in his power to protect human life.
Those of us who had the honor of knowing him are compelled to carry on the mission of defending the innocent. We are grateful that we have known living saintlike men such as the cardinal because they continue to inspire us to pray more, do more, and teach more people the truth about the intrinsic value of the human person.
There is much that has been written about Cardinal O’Connor, but his own words bring to light his legacy without explanation. Let us ponder just a few:
- He once said, “Are we to have a church in which everyone’s judgment is equal to everyone else’s? That’s not a church, it’s chaos. Common sense dictates that you keep the fox out of the chicken coop.”
- Cardinal O’Connor wrote of his Sisters of Life: “They will love with their own lives, with their own hearts, with their own prayers, with their own thoughts. They will never look at anyone except through the eyes of love.”
- And he lovingly said, “I’ll battle abortion until my dying day.”
Cardinal O’Connor exemplified these words of Saint John of the Cross, who wrote, “Have habitual desire to imitate Christ in all your deeds by bringing your life into conformity with his. You must then study his life in order to know how to imitate him and behave in all events as he would.”
We thank God for Cardinal O’Connor, and we pray for the happy repose of his soul.