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But an instinct for renewal—first shown many years ago when he began visiting Protestant churches and Jewish synagogues—has always lived in Cushing, and Pope John gave it form. Partly because of his health and partly because "I can't understand the Latin," Cushing spent only three weeks at each session of the Vatican Council, but no other U.S. bishop seems to have caught more of its spirit. Nor is there any Catholic prelate who grasped better the kind of pastoral revolution planned by the man whom Cushing always calls "good Pope John." "He was the only man who ever understood me," the cardinal says, "and I don't understand myself."
One reason that Cushing has proved so open to church renewal is his freedom from what one reform-minded layman calls "Chancery Catholicism." "Cushing doesn't give a damn for canon law or moral theology," says a Jesuit from the College of the Holy Cross. "He has no tolerance for any kind of legalism in the church." Although many of his priests are perfectly content with a "service-station liturgy" in Latin, Cushing has required every parish to install the dialogue Mass, and openly champions the new English translation of much of the Mass, which will be introduced across the nation on Nov. 29. He also runs a "delayed vocations" seminary for older men who want to become priests. He pleads with the laity to be more active in church affairs. "If you don't, who will?" he asks. "You see the deadwood I have here in the clergy."
Champion of Freedom. Cushing has become a champion of freedom within the church. He tacitly allowed Dr. John Rock, a communicant of the Boston archdiocese, to argue for the moral licitness of a birth-control pill. He welcomed Swiss Theologian Hans Küng, one of Europe's most advanced Catholic thinkers, to Boston, and wrote a preface for Küng's latest book, Structures of the Church. Cushing says that the Index of Forbidden Books is "meaningless," and "they should get rid of the whole thing." He wants to drop the promises that non-Catholic partners in mixed marriages must make to raise their children as Catholics; to ask a believing Protestant to "sign on the dotted line" strikes Cushing as a violation of conscience.
His reasoning is that Catholics "must not just respect but esteem" the religious values of others; he has blossomed as the most convinced and convincing ecumenist in the Catholic Church. With the rector by his side, he has knelt in prayer at Trinity Episcopal Church in Boston, and he claims to have visited 80 Protestant churches. Last month he delivered an address to a Greek Orthodox conference in Denver.
He believes that the task of Christians now is not to join in one church but simply to understand one another. His distrust of Harvard having long since died, he helped organize a Catholic-Protestant ecumenical dialogue there last year with Augustin Cardinal Bea of Rome's Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity as chief speaker. Cushing is trying to raise $1,000,000 for a permanent ecumenical study center in Boston, and has given $100,000 to the Greek Orthodox seminary in Brookline.