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Recently in Salon Mothers Who Think

Sexism and the death chamber
Chivalry lives when a woman must die.
By Cathy Young
[05/04/00]

My spawn arrives!
In the third installment of his lesbian sperm donor saga, Hank Pellissier describes the arrivals of his two babies -- born 21 days apart.
By Hank Pellissier
[05/03/00]

Crossing over
In her new novel, Jayne Anne Phillips, the princess of literary darkness, plumbs the emotional netherlands of motherhood.
By Beth Kephart
[04/28/00]

The virtual bitch slap
A new game, Sissyfight 2000, lets me be the playground bully I never was.
By Amy Silverman
[04/27/00]

The other side of the closet
After 10 years and two children, my husband told me he is gay.
By Janet Nicolazzo
[04/26/00]

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When we arrived at the hospice, we were greeted by the medical director. He said he would personally supervise my mother's case. We met with the social workers and the staff chaplains, who were particularly concerned with making arrangements so that we, an Orthodox Jewish family, would be entirely comfortable in a Catholic hospital. They arranged for kosher food and took down the crucifix in my mother's room.

The check-in procedure at the hospital, while highly emotional, went smoothly. After it was over, I commented to the director about the amazing attention the facility's staff gives its patients and their families.

He thanked me and explained, "Well, it's not every day the cardinal calls."

To this day, I don't know how Cardinal John O'Connor knew that my mother, Judith Alda Goldman, was a new patient at Calvary. The Archdiocese of New York, which O'Connor led for 16 years, runs 17 hospitals, as well as churches, schools and social service agencies. The hospital system alone has over 2,000 beds. How did O'Connor know my mother was in one of them?

The question, and the incident that prompted it, came back to me Wednesday night when the Archdiocese announced that O'Connor had died at the age of 80. In many ways, O'Connor was a tiger of a man; he was a conservative ideologue of the highest order who fought his political and religious foes with a take-no-prisoners ferocity. But at the same time, O'Connor was a man of unusual compassion, who quietly acted with kindness to me and thousands of other New Yorkers.

For 10 years I covered him as a religion reporter for the New York Times. From 1983, when O'Connor was plucked from the Diocese of Scranton, Pa., to be the Archbishop of New York, to 1993, when I left the Times to teach at Columbia, I monitored his every public move.

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