Last Sunday was the 25th anniversary of Cardinal Sean P. O’Malley’s ordination as a bishop, and he celebrated with a Mass at St. Patrick Parish in Natick, dinner and a cake with the Franciscan friars at St. Anthony Shrine in Boston, and a commemorative edition of The Pilot.The big archdiocesan celebration will be Sept. 16, when O’Malley will headline a “priest appreciation dinner’’ as a fund-raiser for the cash-strapped priest pension funds.
For the anniversary, O’Malley wrote a survey of his own career for The Pilot and his blog. By far the best nugget is his characteristically wry description of how he felt in 2003 when he got the call telling him he was being named archbishop of Boston:
“My family took me out to dinner on my birthday, June 29. The phone rang. It was Archbishop Montalvo [the papal nuncio] telling me that the pope wanted me to be Archbishop of Boston. I dropped the cellphone on the ground. I thought, ‘I really need to get caller ID on this thing.’ ’’
There are other moments of humor in the narrative; O’Malley writes, “Had I known I was going to be a bishop, I would have studied much harder in the seminary.’’
He also observes that, after he was first informed in 1984 that he was going to be named a bishop in the Virgin Islands, “there was a total eclipse of the sun, which I was at a loss as how to interpret.’’
He reflects briefly on his career cleaning up dioceses wracked by abuse scandals (Boston is his third such diocese, after Fall River and Palm Beach, Fla.).
He says that when he arrived in Palm Beach, where both of his predecessors had been accused of abuse, “I was fingerprinted, and, at the press conference, one of the reporters asked me whether I was a pedophile.’’
He writes that when he was assigned to Boston, “the climate in Boston could not have been more negative.’’
Summing up his experience, he writes:
“It was a very moving experience for me to be called to this service in the Church. It has been 25 years of a great adventure, for which I am very grateful. I ask the Lord’s forgiveness for my shortcomings and for help so that I may be a better shepherd in the future.’’
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SIC: BG