The Interior Asshole

The Chicago Archbishop that nobody liked, except his mistress

[This essay was developed out of the research from my new novel Rosemont: A Novel of Rosemont, currently available for purchase on Smashwords and Amazon and Barnes & Noble. I like the book a lot and I hope you'll consider reading it; some of the writing process involved researching the Archdiocese of Chicago in the 1980s, and some of that research made for a very good G.O.T.H.S. subject.]

Between its rapid growth in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, its many close-knit Catholic immigrant communities, and its longtime Irish Catholic leadership in the city government, the Archdiocese of Chicago was one of the most prominent archdioceses in the country for many decades. The archbishops who served Chicago were often well-connected at the Vatican, already established as leaders in previous positions, and respected as important spokesmen for the church in America. Chicago still takes a lot of pride in these men and their history, and you can see it in the names of institutions throughout the archdiocese. The arch's seminary is named after Archbishop Mundelein. The old seminary-prep high school was named after Archbishop Quigley. The two pastoral centers in the arch are named for Quigley and Cardinal Meyer. The Catholic center at Northwestern is named for Bishop Sheil. The med school at Loyola University is named for Cardinal Stritch. Cardinal Bernardin, one of the most well-known American bishops of the twentieth century, has his name on a cancer research center at Loyola and a research institute at the Catholic Theological Union.

But not a lot is named after John Patrick Cody, the Cardinal Archbishop of Chicago from 1965 until his death in 1982. There are two reasons for this: first, absolutely nobody liked Cody. Every bishop is technically an autocrat - not a very effective one, but one with a certain level of absolute power over his turf's finances and workforce - and Cody was one of the autocrat-iest of any American bishops of his era, who unilaterally made decisions on firing staff and closing parishes, without any input from anywhere in the Arch, including other prelates. This did not make him a well-liked person in the city.

The second reason nothing is named after Cody is that, at the time of his death, Cody was being investigated by the federal government for embezzling a million dollars in church funds and giving those funds to his longtime mistress, who may have also been his cousin. I’d say that’s the main reason Chicago doesn’t have a Cardinal Cody High School or whatever. 

As Archbishop of Chicago, Cody was the corporation sole owner of all of the assets and property in the arch, an arrangement that doesn't really exist any more in the church today. But it meant that all of the church buildings in the city and surrounding areas, all of the schools, all of the church's money, they weren't in an account held by a corporate "Archdiocese of Chicago" entity, they were all held and unilaterally controlled, personally, by John Patrick Cody. It was Cody, and Cody alone, who shut down parishes and fired people and distributed funds across the Archdiocese. While he did have a small inner circle of clergy who helped advise him, that circle grew smaller as Cody’s reign continued, and priests who disagreed with Cody tended to find themselves getting turfed to remote parishes out in the suburbs. Some priests in Chicago even banded together to form the Association of Catholic Priests, a sort of proto-trade-union for Catholic clergy, specifically to push back against Cody’s autocracy; the ACP would vote through a formal censure of Cody, although that didn’t really accomplish anything, because it turns out censures don’t really do anything to stop autocracy.

But there was a sign that something was about to crack in the July 11th 1980 issue of Chicago Catholic, the official newspaper of the Archdiocese, which, like everything else in the Archdiocese, was controlled unilaterally by Cody, who made the decisions on what ran and what got covered. And in this particular issue, Cody wrote a piece openly criticizing one of the city’s major newspapers, the Chicago Sun-Times, as "not proper judges of an archbishop", for seemingly no reason. There had been no recent Sun-Times stories, of any kind, about Cardinal Cody, and an unprovoked attack on one of the city's two major newspapers was nothing short of bizarre. 

Far more bizarre, though, was the fact that Cody would follow this up with more attacks that used even more extreme rhetoric. The August 22nd 1980 issue of Chicago Catholic asserted that "The Chicago Sun-Times appears to see circulation profit in anti-Catholicism...the Chicago Sun-Times is engaged in a program of character assassination that perhaps would win the endorsement of the Ku Klux Klan." Again, nothing had run in the Sun-Times, and readers of the Chicago Catholic were left baffled at what the hell the cardinal was getting at, and whether the newspaper had found a body in his basement or something.

Then, if that wasn't enough, the Sun-Times' crosstown rival the Chicago Tribune ran a statement from Cody on November 2nd 1980, which called the Sun-Times "an affront to all Catholics", and posited that the Sun-Times was out to get the cardinal because "the Cardinal and the Church have enunciated a lifestyle opposed to that of the Sun-Times". This comment was not clarified later in the statement. Again, it would be almost another full year before the Sun-Times would break any story on Cody, but Cody was already out in front of this apparently gay-ass Klan paper.

But then the story actually came out, and there was nothing gay-ass or Klanny about it. The Sun-Times reported in a multi-part series in September of 1981 that Cody was currently under federal investigation for embezzling funds - and we're talking hundreds of thousands of dollars stolen over decades of being a bishop - and siphoning the money to a woman named Helen Dolan Wilson.

It's not super-clear who Helen Dolan Wilson was to Cardinal Cody, because Cody had been asked about her on different occasions and had described their relationship differently every time - in some cases an employee, in some cases related by blood, in some cases related by marriage - which is a really great sign. She was definitely on the payroll of multiple diocese as Cody was running those respective diocese, and collected a salary even though other diocesan employees had no fucking idea who she was, what she did for that paycheck, and when or if she was coming in to work at all. Her salary was always modest, though, so it was unclear to the reporters at the Sun-Times how she was able to live in Chicago's high-end Lake Point Tower condos, or how she was able to buy a summer house in Florida which included a sauna and hand-painted murals, or how her son was able to buy a house, or why those purchases aligned with the timing of Cody making big withdrawals of archdiocesan funds, or why priests in the archdiocese who asked questions about this tended to get transferred out of the archdiocese. Most of these questions are still unanswered, as the government closed their investigation of Cody after his death in 1982. Maybe Helen Dolan Wilson was actually Cody's step-cousin or whatever, but she would have been a step-cousin upon whom he would repeatedly shower money, which feels kind of weird. Or, maybe Helen Dolan Wilson was Cody's mistress, in which case, I don't know if I would go with the cover story that she was a relative, step- or otherwise.

This report was a seismic event in the archdiocese, and immediately led to serious self-reflection and contrition on the part of everyone who worked in the church. I'm joking, of course: Catholic readers of the Sun-Times canceled their subscriptions in protest, priests told their congregations - during homilies! - not to buy the paper, and Catholic hospitals stopped carrying the paper. A bishop was caught red-handed doing something obviously wrong and criminal, and the response of wide swaths of the church was to deny everything and accuse everyone who noticed the crimes of being anti-Catholic. But it was only 1981, so rest assured that from here, "Catholics denying crimes" would get louder, and the crimes would get way worse.

Cody was a dick. He exercised his authority capriciously and for his own benefit, and it resulted in draining resources that the archdiocese could have used to better serve Chicago. He is widely considered an embarrassment to the archdiocese.

But, believe it or not, this guy occasionally got things right. Cody was active in his previous archdiocese of New Orleans as a proponent of school integration at a time when that was not a popular stance. He even went so far as to excommunicate segregationist politicians from the arch. In Chicago, he pioneered the arch's famous parish "twinning" structure, in which affluent parishes would share their funds with underserved ones; he also pushed hard for twinned parishes to regularly interact and pray together to strengthen their relationship, and improve cross-parish interaction in a famously segregated and turfy city. While he would not be considered a vocal ally of LGBT Catholics by any means, he did give LGBT Catholic group Dignity/Chicago a space to have their own weekly Mass and meet, which puts him ahead of most of his contemporary bishops. 

With this in mind, you may ask "was Cody really that bad?" to which the answer is "yeah, he definitely was"; he had a large amount of unchallenged authority as a bishop, and he used it to enrich himself and a woman he might have been fucking, and yeah, I do think that's enough to offset the good he tried to do. 

Now, consider Cody's replacement at the arch of Chicago, Joseph Bernardin, who was one of the most prominent bishops of the twentieth century. Catholics considered him to be a leader in politically "liberal" thought in the church after the second Vatican council, probably because he is famous for his teachings on the "consistent ethic of life". These teachings, also referred to as the "seamless garment" ethic, were an attempt to show the church that stereotypically "pro-life" political issues like abortion could not be separated from other key life issues like capital punishment or nuclear disarmament; Bernardin's teachings are seen today as an important warning to the church that their political concerns could not be reduced to just abortion issues, and that Catholics could not reduce their faith to their political participation or mere party alignment (Bernardin was, let's say, unsuccessful at making this message stick). Where Cody was cold and aloof, Bernardin was accessible and willing to listen to others. Where Cody was abrasive, Bernardin was kindly. Bernardin was and is a celebrated figure in Chicago and among liberal-leaning Catholics; when he died in 1996, my Catholic grade school stopped classes so we could watch his funeral on television.

But, believe it or not, this guy could occasionally get things wrong.

Bernardin is often celebrated for using pastoral rhetoric in discussing how the church should treat LGBT Catholics, but that rhetoric was at odds with his real material action. Using the unique political pull that the archdiocese had in Chicago, Bernardin single-handedly sank a 1986 non-discrimination ordinance being considered in the Chicago city council, because he vocally defended the church's right to fire gay employees whenever they wanted (the ordinance passed two years later over Bernardin's objections).

Bernardin spoke out on the church's need to minister to AIDS patients before many of his fellow bishops did; unfortunately, "before many of his fellow bishops" is still "five years after everyone else", and once the Arch finally encouraged Catholic health care providers to care for AIDS patients without judgments or discrimination, the director of the Howard Brown Memorial Clinic - at the forefront of care early in the Chicago AIDS crisis - could barely contain his disdain, saying in 1986 "It's wonderful to hear the diocese has taken a nondiscriminatory stance on AIDS. We could have used their support...a lot sooner."

There's also this other thing where Bernardin used his power as archbishop to reassign sexually abusive priests throughout the diocese so they could avoid legal and professional consequences, which erupted into a citywide scandal in 1991. Bernardin is often celebrated for writing sexual abuse prevention policies long before his fellow bishops did, policies that would become the model for the USCCB's response to the broader sexual abuse crisis. People who celebrate Bernardin for this tend to elide that he wrote the policies in response to a crisis that he, directly, caused. Again, he may have acted earlier than his fellow bishops, but that still ended up being too late for the victims of these priests.

By the standard of the bishops from his era, Bernardin was great, and he was likely a better pastor than every living American bishop today. But by the standards of "other compassionate human beings of his era", Bernardin fell short on several key issues that had material consequences for the community under his care. And if the standard for bishops is lower than the standard for other human beings, a nicer or more pastoral bishop than the previous guy isn't going to fix the church's problems.

I bring this up to highlight the real problem with Cody. It wasn't "we concentrated all of this unaccountable, unchallenged power in the wrong guy", it was "we concentrated all of this unaccountable, unchallenged power, period." When you replace the autocratic leader of the archdiocese with someone who is less dickish, you still end up with serious problems, because those problems are rooted in structural power, not general dickishness. So if you pray for the church, pray for a radical reimagining of power, pray for those that the structure of the church ignores or forgets, pray for a church led by someone other than the bishops. Don't waste your time just asking for a nicer tyrant.

Grift of the Holy Spirit is a series by Tony Ginocchio detailing stories of the weirdest, dumbest, and saddest members of the Catholic church. You can subscribe via Substack to get notified of future installments. This essay is adapted from my new book Rosemont: A Novel of Rosemont, which you can now purchase at Smashwords or Amazon or Barnes & Noble.

Sources used for this piece include:

Clements, Bill. “Uncovering the Cardinal”. Chicago Magazine. December 2002. https://web.archive.org/web/20110202124617/http://www.people.com/people/archive/article/0,,20080311,00.html

Conroy, John. “Cardinal Sins”. The Chicago Reader. 4 June 1987. https://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/cardinal-sins/Content?oid=870710

Faraone, Dominic E., "Urban Rifts and Religious Reciprocity: Chicago and the Catholic Church, 1965-1996" (2013). Dissertations (2009 -). Paper 254. http://epublications.marquette.edu/dissertations_mu/254

McGuire, John and Linda Witt. “A Deepening Scandal Over Church Funds Rocks a Cardinal and His Controversial Cousin”. People. 28 September 1981. https://web.archive.org/web/20110202124617/http://www.people.com/people/archive/article/0,,20080311,00.html

Millies, Steven P. Joseph Bernardin: Seeking Common Ground. Liturgical Press, 2016.