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The bishop's quandary | Continued
Born on December 7, 1947, Gregory grew up on the South Side of Chicago, where there was an unusually large African-American Catholic community. Remembering her mother's experience at St. Benedict's, his Protestant mother sent him to St. Carthage High School, where he fell in love with the pomp and spectacle of the Catholic liturgy. "He loves the majesty," says someone who's known him since high school. In 1959, when he was in sixth grade, his mother also allowed Gregory to be baptized as a Catholic, and some old friends say that she had herself baptized, too. Several black families in the neighborhood made the same decision that the Gregorys did, and St. Carthage found itself changed. "All of a sudden, four black kids came in all together," recalls Sister Elizabeth Williams, who taught Gregory that year. "They told me they wanted to become Catholics, and they were so serious. I thought, `Wow, this is great. Serious children.' " Gregory moved on to Quigley Preparatory Seminary and then to St. Mary of the Lake, the Archdiocese of Chicago's seminary in Mundelein, Illinois. The liturgy still entranced him, and he was well-liked and admired for his singing voice, which he'd probably inherited from his mother, who once had made extra money singing the character of Aunt Jemima in radio ads for the pancake syrup. Yet, there were moments when Gregory was reminded forcefully that he'd entered a world that in many ways was alien. In one seminary class, Gregory received grades that were consistently lower than those he received in his other classes. One day, the teacher made a pointed reference in class to "pickaninnies." "He revealed his hand," recalls Gregory, who immediately went to the seminary administration and called the man out as a racist. He demanded that he be allowed to rewrite all his previous papers. The dean of studies graded the papers again, and Gregory received A's on every one of them. Still, whenever he and his fellow students wrangled about the direction of the church, Gregory often was the conservative in the group. "They told me, `Wilton, you're always defending the church,' " he recalls. He was ordained in May 1973 during a turbulent time for Chicago's black Catholic community. Led by two priests, the Rev. Rollins Lambert and the Rev. George Clements, Chicago's black Catholics allied themselves with the various social-justice groups active on the South Side, including the Black Panther Party. (In 1969, after the Chicago police shot down two leaders of the party in their apartment, Bobby Rush, then a ranking member of the Black Panthers and now a US congressman, sought and was granted sanctuary from the Chicago Police Department in Clements's church.) After he was ordained, and after a stint studying liturgical theology at the Pontifical Liturgical Institute in Rome, Gregory returned to Chicago. "At the time," recalls Clements, "I was looked upon as kind of a maverick. The general attitude of most Catholics in Chicago was `Hey, do what you want to do in the ghetto, just don't come out where we are.' It was a time of great tension in Chicago, and Wilton was able to strike a balance there - not alienate the whites but still become very close with the blacks. It was good that we had somebody who could be the bridge. I didn't want him to get into trouble. I was in enough trouble for both of us." Gregory's work as an instructor at Mundelein brought him to the attention of Cardinal Bernardin, who was attempting to rebuild the morale in Chicago after the fractious reign of Cardinal John Cody. Bernardin already was a force in the American church. Between 1974 and 1977, while president of the US bishops' conference, and with Pope Paul VI at the end of his pontificate, Bernardin had turned the conference into a powerful voice for the American church, speaking out on everything from church doctrine to nuclear weapons. In 1979, when the vigorous John Paul II was elected, he began to transform the hierarchy into a more conservative body, and he cracked down generally on organizations like the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. Whatever influence the world at large believes the conference has today is a vestige of what Bernardin and others did with it in the 1970s. In 1982, Bernardin brought Gregory into the chancery and, Gregory's friends noted, onto the clerical fast track. They traveled together as Bernardin worked to pull the archdiocese back together. A year later, Bernardin petitioned Rome to make Gregory an auxiliary bishop. He'd been a priest for only 10 years. "Joe Bernardin took an enormous risk in sending my name to the Holy Father," Gregory says. "To have a 35-year-old named your auxiliary? That took some chutzpah. He'd known me, at best, a year and a half. "I learned more from his good example than from anything he might have said. It was his own sense of equilibrium, a deep commitment to the work of the gospel, to the work of the conference of bishops, to working in a collaborative effort. I learned to be a man who enjoyed serving the church from him." Gregory was a bishop in Chicago for nearly a decade. During that time, he worked with Bernardin on a number of issues, including complaints that priests had been sexually abusing children. The Chicago Archdiocese enacted a policy by which any accusation would be taken seriously and, among other things, would be reported to the civil authorities. In 1992, Bernardin took 300 copies of the policy to the bishops' annual June meeting. Very few of his colleagues looked at it. "Some of these guys lived in a vacuum," recalls Monsignor Anthony Velo, a former aide to Bernardin in Chicago. A year later, Bernardin began to hear horror stories from Belleville. A dozen priests - nearly 10 percent of the small diocese's total - were accused of abusing children. The bishop was being removed. A delegation from the diocese came to visit Bernardin, who once again sent Wilton Gregory's name to Rome.
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e is a child of the Great Migration. One of his grandfathers was a coal miner in southern Illinois, not far from Belleville. Leanna Martin, his maternal great-grandmother, was a sharecropper who migrated from Oxford, Mississippi, working her way north through Nebraska and Iowa until she settled in Chicago, where she sent her two daughters farther north to Milwaukee to be educated by the Franciscans at St. Benedict the Moor, one of the few private boarding schools anywhere that would admit black students. As a condition of the children's acceptance, however, Gregory's grandmother and aunt were baptized and confirmed in the Catholic Church. As soon as they were graduated, however, the two girls went back to being the good Protestants that they had been.