Cardinal Joseph Bernadin

Cardinal Joseph Bernardin

1928 - 1996

 

 

 Joseph Bernardin was born in Columbia, South Carolina to hard working Italian immigrants who were born in what was then the last remnants of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.  When his father died, young Joseph stepped in to help his mother support the family that included a younger sister. His original desire to be a physician was abandoned to a response to the priestly vocation.

He was ordained a priest in Columbia in 1952 and after serving in various capacities both ministerial and administrative, was named Auxiliary Bishop of Atlanta in 1966. Bernardin was 38 and the youngest bishop in the United States. In 1972, he was named Archbishop of Cincinnati where he worked closely with non-Catholics and non-Christians to better relationships and understanding.

In 1982, Bernardin was named Archbishop of Chicago and named Cardinal the year after. In Chicago, Bernardin found an archdiocese beset by financial and legal woes, a disgruntled clergy and faithful wearied by the tempestuous and scandal-ridden last years of previous archbishop Cardinal John Cody. Famously announcing that he arrived not as an ecclesiastical autocrat but a shepherd and “Joseph, your brother”, Bernardin slowly began to heal wounds and divisions within the archdiocese, with other religions and the wider world.

Bernardin led the episcopal condemnation of the nuclear arms race and war itself, He opened fruitful avenues of dialogue with the Jewish people and made the Church both a safe-haven for those affected by the horrendous AIDS epidemic and champion for the cause of research and cures. He also was among the first in the Church to remove priests accused of sexual impropriety even though he himself was wrongly accused by a former student who later recanted the accusation. Cardinal Bernardin died of pancreatic cancer in 1996.