A meeting with the cardinal

I’m Catholic – uber-Catholic, product of 16 years of Catholic education, half of them in seminaries. I would have made a great priest. I still carry with me a photograph of my 19-year-old self in a cassock and Roman collar which my worthless friends, for some reason, react to with howling screams of laughter.

In 1976, when my newly married Thai wife and I moved from Songkhla to Mobile, Alabama, we made a deal that our kids would be raised Catholic if we lived in the US, Buddhist if we lived in Thailand. A year later, we moved back to Thailand. Over the next 34 years, our four kids grew up Thai and Buddhist. At one point, I started attending Sunday Mass at the little Catholic church in Songkhla and taking with me my four-year-old daughter Erika. Her first time in church, she stared at the massive crucifix behind the altar, at the bleeding crown of thorns and hands and feet pierced with nails.  

“Papa, who’s that?” she asked me.

“That’s Phra Yesu,” I replied, using the Thai name.

“Oh.” She was silent a moment, staring at the bloody crucifix. “But what did he do? He must have done something really bad.”  

Two decades later, Erika is now 24 and in her last year of nursing school in Newburgh, New York. My granddaughter Isabella, her elder sister’s daughter, is ten, and as Saint Patrick’s Day loomed I sought to instill in her something of her Irish heritage. I’m half Irish, she’s one-eighth, along with three-quarters Thai. When her fifth-grade teacher asked how many students in the class were Irish, her hand promptly shot up, though she looks about as Irish as Genghis Khan.  

On Saint Patrick’s Day, she was right up against the rail on 54th St, when the parade came marching down Fifth Avenue: the brave Irish-American firefighters with their kilts and bagpipes and fifes and drums, the police, the Marines, the Air Force, high-school marching bands from around the world. After a couple hours, I was astonished to hear that Isabella had never been inside a Catholic church. 

So I marched with her a couple of blocks downtown to Saint Patrick’s Cathedral.

The cathedral’s archbishop was Timothy Dolan, who had recently been elevated to cardinal by Pope Benedict in Rome. The New York tabloids had followed his progress to Rome in daily fawning articles. He was four years younger than me, a company man in his support of birth control and priestly celibacy, but he showed a great sense of humour, joking about his weight and his fondness for beer.

Isabella and I stepped through a side entrance into the cathedral. She was properly awed by the lofty columns, the giant statuary, the stained glass windows. Rows of candles burned before a portrait of Saint Patrick.

“Who built all this?”

“The Irish. Mostly the Irish.”

Behind the main altar, there were small chapels, one adorned by a Pieta, a statue of the expired Jesus held by his sorrowing mother.

“Who’s that woman?” asked Isabella.

“That’s the Virgin Mary, the mother of Jesus.”

“And what happened to him? Is he dead?”

“He was crucified.”

“What does crucified mean?”

I was explaining about Good Friday, the Jewish priests and the Romans and their method of execution when Cardinal Dolan walked up, clad in red, leading a small entourage.

“Cardinal Dolan!” I said in wonder.

He smiled and put his arm around Isabella and made the sign of the Cross with his thumb on her forehead.

“This is my granddaughter,” I explained.

“How are you?” he said, hugging her. “Did you see the parade? Part of the parade?”

“Yes, I did.”

“Well, great!” He grinned and held out a hand to me. “How you doing?”

“Good, thanks.” We shook hands and he walked away.

“Who was that?” Isabella asked. “A friend of yours?”

“Wow! That’s Cardinal Dolan. This is his church. He’s the boss of all New York. He’s a cardinal!”

“What’s a cardinal?”

Outside the cathedral, I called up my sister, who was as excited as I was. I called my daughter Elizabeth, Isabella’s mother.

“Guess who we just met! Cardinal Dolan!

“Who?”

I saw I had a lot of explaining to do.

 

James Eckardt is a freelance writer, author of numerous books on Thailand, and a former Nation staffer.