2016-07-27
NEW YORK, May 3--Cardinal John O'Connor, one of the country's most outspoken Catholic leaders who charmed New Yorkers with his wit and warmth while using his opposition to abortion and homosexuality to make headlines and chastise politicians, died Wednesday. He was 80.

O'Connor's funeral was scheduled for Monday, May, 8, at famed St. Patrick's Cathedral.

O'Connor was the oldest active bishop in the United States and one of the country's most influential Catholics. His health began to fail after he had a brain tumor removed in August.

Although he mustered the strength to make a farewell visit to the pope in February, he missed many of the public Masses at St. Patrick's in the months following his surgery.

O'Connor, the spiritual leader of more than 2 million Roman Catholics in the New York Archdiocese, had been in poor health since the August operation. But a spokesman said the cardinal's health took a "sudden and dramatic turn for the worse" Wednesday morning.

O'Connor died at 8:05 p.m. at his Manhattan residence adjacent to St. Patrick's with his sister, other family members, clergy and colleagues at his side, said church spokesman Joe Zwilling.

He has not appeared in public since March 5, and even then he only spoke briefly to his congregation and did not read a sermon.

Last month, for the first time in the 16 years that he led the archdiocese, he was unable to watch the Easter Parade from the cathedral's steps.

Zwilling said the cardinal's condition worsened Tuesday night. O'Connor's sister, various other relatives, and fellow clergy were sitting with him-- three people at a time--in his residence behind the cathedral but the cardinal was unable to speak.

Cardinal Bernard F. Law flew to New York from Boston Wednesday to be at his side. The two men have long been friends and ideological allies. Law's spokesman, John Walsh, said: "They were made archbishop around the same time, raised to the role of cardinal at the same time, and share geographical proximity, similarities in outlook on the church, so they gravitated to one another. There was a natural chemistry there, and this relationship grew even closer during this very difficult time." Law has been one of several colleagues rumored to be a possible successor to O'Connor. Other widely mentioned possibilities include Bishop Sean O'Malley of Fall River, Mass. and Auxiliary Bishop William Murphy of Boston.

However, nobody outside the Vatican knows--or talks about--these things with any certainty. When his predecessor, Cardinal Terence Cooke died, nobody guessed the replacement would be O'Connor, who had been a bishop in Scranton, Pa., and, before that, vicar of the US Armed forces.

O'Connor was appointed to the archdiocese in 1984, and almost instantly stirred up controversy by expressing Rome's views on high-profile political issues in a far more outspoken manner than his predecessors.

Right away he publicly likened abortion to the Nazi Holocaust, denounced homosexuality as a sin, and criticized Geraldine Ferraro--then a Queens congresswoman running as the Democratic vice presidential candidate--for supporting abortion rights.

These were not uniformly popular positions to take in this archdiocese, which consists of much of New York City, its suburbs, and the Hudson Valley.

O'Connor defied easy categories, however, marching alongside union workers, campaigning for a raise in the minimum wage, and taking care--often anonymously--of dying patients in AIDS clinics.

In 1987, after a trip to Jerusalem, he played a major role in persuading the Vatican to admit, and apologize for, its past record of anti-Semitism. He became close friends with New York's Jewish mayor of the time, Edward Koch. The two even wrote a book together.

He has also been friendly with the current mayor, Rudolph Giuliani, who is Catholic. But, unlike Cardinal Francis Spellman, who was called "The Powerhouse" when he ran the archdiocese from 1937 to 1967, O'Connor never sought to play a role in the city's political affairs.

Over the past decade O'Connor considerably softened the confrontational stance of his early days and became a popular cardinal, though a less influential one than he might have been in an earlier time. In Spellman's day, for instance, Irish Catholics formed a big part of the city's power elite-and every Cardinal, since the archdiocese was founded, has been of Irish descent.

However, in recent years, the Irish have faded as a unified ethnic bloc, and, apart from political considerations, a growing percentage of the city's Catholics are now Hispanics, who feel little connection to the man in St. Patrick's.

O'Connor has submitted his resignation to the Vatican for the past five years, a motion consistently ignored. It was widely believed the Pope would finally let him go last January, when O'Connor turned 80, the age when Cardinals lose their voting rights in the Vatican Council, but he was kept on the job.

Following his August surgery, O'Connor suffered complications from his treatments and often appeared weak and bloated. Although cancer killed Cardinal John O'Connor, the ``C'' word was first used publicly only hours after his death.

``That was the cardinal's choice,'' said spokesman Zwilling. ``He handled it the way he wished it to be handled.''

In October, while inaugurating a new cancer-treatment facility, the cardinal was asked whether he had the disease.

He replied that he would not use the word ``cancer'' to describe the tumor that had been removed from his brain weeks earlier because his doctors had not used it.

``No one has used it,'' O'Connor said then. ``I haven't been using it. They told me I had a brain tumor. They took it out. And now they're using the X-ray treatment to assure there's nothing else.''

Following O'Conor's death, Zwilling refused to discuss why the cardinal decided not to talk about cancer. He said that although O'Connor was aware he had the disease, ``he was determined not to stop for this. He wanted to continue being the archbishop of New York for as long as he was physically able to do that.''

And he never hid the fact that he was sick, Zwilling said.

``He was very public, he was not afraid at all to come into St. Patrick's Cathedral with no hair, bloated from the treatments that he was receiving,'' said Zwilling, adding that the cardinal celebrated Mass while occasionally stumbling or slurring words. ``He knew what was going on, he never denied it or tried to contradict it.''

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