Editor's Letter

Divine Right

Will there ever be an American pope?

The smoke signal from the Italian media is that one day New York's John Cardinal O'Connor might be—the Italian press has recently referred to him as "papabile," or popeable. Whether or not the former U.S. Navy chaplain ends up in Rome, he has become the most powerful American prelate since the power-brokering days of Cardinal Spellman. O'Connor is the perfect ideological alter ego to the current reactionary pope, John Paul II, who is said to have declared, "I want a man just like me in New York," when he surprised everyone by appointing O'Connor archbishop six years ago.

Barely a day passes without the cardinal hitting the tabloid headlines by rigorously holding to the church's line on abortion, birth control, and homosexuality, but it has been several years since O'Connor was willing to open up about his own secular and religious lives, as he does in the article by Leslie Bennetts on page 134. He talks frankly with her about faith, doubt, anger, celibacy, and whether or not he thinks he is doing a good job. What makes the profile unique is that for the first time scores of priests and nuns join the cardinal's usual critics to vent their anger, frustration, and 8 doubt about where he is taking their church and our | society. There is no question that O'Connor is giv| ing vivid expression to the pope's will, but what is ⅜ the nature of a faith that allows him to be deaf to the most pitiable pleas, such as for contraception to prevent the birth of AIDS babies? The new prediction that in ten years one in twenty-five New Yorkers will be sick with AIDS appears to leave him unmoved.

At a time when his flock seems to be farther than ever from the official teachings of the church, O'Connor's 1950s Weltanschauung is, according to many, making things worse. The story of Cardinal O'Connor is a paradigm of the story of American Catholicism today. Is he a dinosaur on the verge of extinction or will he and his message prevail in leading the church morally intact into the next century? Leslie Bennetts's profile adds a thoughtful and challenging dimension to the question.

Editor in chief