On Monday, April 20, Boston’s Archbishop, Cardinal Sean O’Malley, visited Gordon College, where I teach. It was an instructive time for the entire college community. His talk was entitled “Our Common Concern for the Least among Us.” Recognizing abiding differences between Catholics and Protestants, he nonetheless enjoined all Christians to pursue what we might call an ecumenism of compassion, a mutual devotion to serve the poor and outcasts in society. It was a timeless, bracing message, delivered by a man who is no stranger to working in the trenches with the truly needy–a vocation arguably too few of us pursue.
Dressed in his Franciscan habit and wearing his red Cardinal’s cap, the Archbishop possesses a commanding presence–brimming with spiritual gravitas, but also profoundly winsome, and at moments quite funny. A native of Ohio, he received the (inevitable) question: was he now a Red Sox fan? Without missing a beat, he dodged the question and shot back: “the Red Sox did not win a national championship for over a century until I became archbishop in 2003. I’ll take credit for that.” This brought the house down.
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