I was talking with my mother yesterday about Cardinal Law resigning. What does it mean? Is there a light at the end of the tunnel? Is this the beginning of something good and healing, or is this the end? I thought the man would never resign, and while he remained, it seemed as though, in the words of John Dean, there was a “cancer” on the Church, and it was spreading.
Mum went to Albertus Magnus University in the 1960s, a Catholic women’s college. Many of my aunts went there, and a couple of my great-aunts, who were nuns at the time, were on the faculty. Mum was telling me what it was like, when she was there.
“You could not walk on the grass. Nobody walked on the grass.”
“So the rules were really strict,” I said.
“Oh, so strict! I remember leading a rally with a friend for them to allow us a second carton of milk at lunch! This is like another world from the way it is now. And then … I don’t know who was the first one to do it … but people started walking on the grass. And from then on, it was like the nuns were happy if we just showed up in class.”
“Really?”
Then Mum tied it all together for me: “So I think Cardinal Law being forced to resign is like people suddenly walking on the grass.”
