{"id":61,"date":"2008-08-05T09:36:42","date_gmt":"2008-08-05T09:36:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/pontifications\/2008\/08\/lacecurtain-irishshanty-cardin.html"},"modified":"2008-08-05T09:36:42","modified_gmt":"2008-08-05T09:36:42","slug":"lacecurtain-irishshanty-cardin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/2008\/08\/lacecurtain-irishshanty-cardin.html","title":{"rendered":"Lace-Curtain Irish…Shanty Cardinal?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sean O’Malley, the archbishop of Boston and now a cardinal five years into his difficult tenure there, cracked wise in his installation homily about his “lace-curtain” pretensions given that he’d moved to Florida (Palm Beach, no less) from his posting in Fall River, before being called back to Boston.
\nIt was one of the many O’Malley moments that charmed me from the start, though many closer to the scene have far different views of “Cardinal Sean,” as the Capuchin likes to be called. And charm only goes so far. Still, I find the harsher criticisms of him untenable, as well as uncharitable. Every time he’s been called by the church it has been to clean up an awful mess of the hierarchy’s making, and he has done extraordinary work in exrtaordinarily difficult circumstances. He sold the mansion, and much else, and lives as humbly as any prince of the church I’ve seen.
\nAnd he has kept his sense of humor. And his sense of God. As the Boston Globe’s first-class religion writer, Michael Paulson, leads in this anniversay profile<\/a>, O’Malley held no grand celebrations in his own honor for the anniversay, but instead “skipped town, checked into a monastery, and prayed.”<\/p>\n

Five years after he was installed as the Roman Catholic archbishop of Boston, O’Malley remains in many ways the most unusual of public figures – the prince who dresses as the pauper, the leading man who hates the spotlight, the shy man prone to bouts of silence who has, in his own inexorable way, tackled one crushing problem after another, delivering the archdiocese from something close to free-fall to something akin to stability.
\nHe arrived in Boston on July 30, 2003, confronting, for the third time in his career as a bishop, a diocese thrown into crisis by clergy sexual abuse. But if the situations confronting the Fall River and Palm Beach dioceses had been grim, the situation in Boston was ruinous. So bad, in fact, that when Pope John Paul II asked him to move to Boston, O’Malley unsuccessfully sent a plea to the pope to reconsider.
\n“I dropped the phone . . . it was quite a shock,” O’Malley said in an interview Tuesday. “I did ask him to reconsider, and it came back immediately with, no, this is what he wants you to do.”
\nO’Malley ticked off the litany of woes that confronted the archdiocese that summer: parishioners angry and bolting over the abuse crisis, the church’s coffers in “economic free-fall,” money-losing hospitals, failing pension funds, a rapidly emptying seminary, and 1,000 lawsuits against the diocese.
\n“When I got here I found out that things were worse than I had feared,” he said. “Things were just in very, very bad shape.”
\nHe still faces enormous challenges and has many critics…<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Read more here<\/a>…
\nBut also check out Michael’s new blog, the aptly titled “Articles of Faith<\/a>,” and consider linking in to his noontime online chat<\/a> today about O’Malley.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sean O’Malley, the archbishop of Boston and now a cardinal five years into his difficult tenure there, cracked wise in his installation homily about his “lace-curtain” pretensions given that he’d moved to Florida (Palm Beach, no less) from his posting in Fall River, before being called back to Boston. It was one of the many…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":128,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,2,6,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-61","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bishops","category-catholic","category-church","category-pope"],"yoast_head":"\nLace-Curtain Irish...Shanty Cardinal? - Pontifications<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/2008\/08\/lacecurtain-irishshanty-cardin.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Lace-Curtain Irish...Shanty Cardinal? - Pontifications\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Sean O’Malley, the archbishop of Boston and now a cardinal five years into his difficult tenure there, cracked wise in his installation homily about his “lace-curtain” pretensions given that he’d moved to Florida (Palm Beach, no less) from his posting in Fall River, before being called back to Boston. 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He came by all those vocations by accident, or Providence, during a longer-than-expected sojourn in Rome in the 1980s. Gibson began his journalistic career as a walk-on sports editor and columnist at The International Courier, a small daily in Rome serving Italy's English-language community. He then found a job as a newscaster and writer across the Tiber at the English Programme at Vatican Radio, an entity he describes as a cross between NPR and Armed Forces Radio for the pope. The Jesuits who ran the radio were charitable enough to hire Gibson even though he had no radio background, could not pronounce the name \"Karol Wojtyla,\" and wasn't Catholic. Time and experience overcame all those challenges, and Gibson went on to cover dozens of John Paul II's overseas trips, including papal visits to Africa, Europe, Latin America and the United States. When Gibson returned to the United States in 1990 he returned to print journalism to cover the religion beat in his native New Jersey for two dailies. He worked first for The Record of Hackensack, and then for The Star-Ledger of New Jersey, winning the nation's top awards in religion writing at both places. In 1999 he won the Supple Religion Writer of the Year contest, and in 2000 he was chosen as the Templeton Religion Reporter of the Year. Gibson is a longtime board member of the Religion Newswriters Association and he is a contributor to ReligionLink, a service of the Religion Newswriters Foundation. Since 2003, David Gibson has been an independent writer specializing in Catholicism, religion in contemporary America, and early Christian history. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Boston Magazine, Commonweal, America, The New York Observer, Beliefnet and Religion News Service. He has produced documentaries on early Christianity for CNN and other networks and has traveled on assignment to dozens of countries, with an emphasis on reporting from Europe and the Middle East. He is a frequent television commentator and has appeared on the major cable and broadcast networks. He is also a regular speaker at conferences and seminars on Catholicism, religion in America, and journalism. Gibson's first book, The Coming Catholic Church: How the Faithful are Shaping a New American Catholicism (HarperSanFrancisco), was published in 2003 and deals with the church-wide crisis revealed by the clergy sexual abuse crisis. The book was widely hailed as a \"powerful\" and \"first-rate\" treatment of the crisis from \"an academically informed journalist of the highest caliber.\" His second book, The Rule of Benedict: Pope Benedict XVI and His Battle with the Modern World (HarperSanFrancisco), came out in 2006 and is the first full-scale treatment of the Ratzinger papacy--how it happened, who he is, and what it means for the Catholic Church. The Rule of Benedict has been praised as \"an exceptionally interesting and illuminating book\" from \"a master storyeller.\" Born and raised in New Jersey, David Gibson studied European history at Furman University in South Carolina and spent a year working on Capitol Hill before moving to Italy. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter and is working on a book about conversion, and on several film and television projects.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/author\/dgibson"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/128"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=61"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=61"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=61"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=61"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}