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Like Confessing on TV. He is largely indifferent to the Vatican Council debates on such weighty theological issues as collegiality of bishops or whether Scripture and tradition constitute one or two sources of divine revelation. Much more important to him is the shortage of priests. He tried but failed to get permission from Rome to confer priesthood on a married man, Lutheran Convert Ernest Beck, who was later ordained in Mainz, Germany (TIME, July 10). Currently, Cushing is sponsoring the priestly studies of a married former Episcopal priest. But he does not favor ordaining women. "I've supported many lost causes in my lifetime," he told one group of nuns, "but this one is not for me. I could never confess my sins to a woman; it would be like doing it on television."
The cardinal, says one Boston layman, "is a very complex man. He has you cheering for him one moment and he sort of embarrasses you the next." Cause of the embarrassment is what a member of Cushing's chancery delicately calls his "follies of the heart." Although many bishops have denounced Moral Re-Armament as a false kind of super-religion, Cushing has written a glowing foreword to a book of essays by M.R.A.'s director, British Journalist Peter Howard. When CBS in 1961 produced a documentary that showed Boston cops entering a bookie joint, Cushing—who was worried about the effect of the program on the morale of the policemen's families—went to a policemen's ball and said, "Someone betrayed us!" Cushing has declared that he would accept a Negro as an auxiliary bishop, long ago outlawed segregation from Boston's Catholic institutions. But he has been slow to help eradicate the anti-Negro prejudice that lingers on in South Boston.
From Canon Law to l-Thou. "Cushing fits in with the new spirit," says William Storey, associate professor of history at Pittsburgh's Duquesne University, "but I wonder if he realizes that the whole process must go a lot farther." Going a lot farther would include approval of married deacons, lay election of bishops, general adoption of civilian dress in place of clerical black and Roman collars, the abolition of such medieval practices as ring kissing and ermine-trimmed robes for cardinals, the right of Catholics to contract mixed marriages before Protestant ministers. Perhaps the greatest possibility is that of a person-centered theology of marriage that owes more to Martin Buber's I-Thou relationship than to canon law —and thus might resolve the most troubling moral issue that faces U.S. Catholics today: birth control.
Recently, Pope Paul VI announced that the church's condemnation of the birth-control pill, which dates from a 1958 statement of Pius XII, was being restudied in Rome—thereby implying the possibility that some change in the church's position might be forthcoming. Many Catholics would regard any redefinition of a doctrinal stand as a betrayal, and Monsignor George Kelly, New York's archdiocesan expert on family problems, has written every U.S. diocese asking bishops to petition the Pope to hold fast to Pius' teaching.