COPS AND THE CARDINAL

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

The CRIMSON editorial on Cardinal Cushing's impassioned statement at the Police Ball tried hard to be perceptive, but it certainly missed the delightful humor in the event and in its aftermath.

The first reports were word-of-mouth and then in the papers. (The Globe story was wonderfully sensationalized, and the Cardinal's text came then as a let-down; another paper, I am told, took liberties with the text.) They left me wishing Gilbert and Sullivan belonged to our generation. The sight of the police band spontaneously breaking into "For Boston! For Boston!" so that the Cardinal could not complete his written statement; the sound of the rifle butts of the honor guard pounding on the floor in enthusiasm; the sense of renewal, loyalty, pride, and closing of ranks, should not be allowed to die unsung.

But the text of Cardinal Cushing's prepared remarks had a wisdom, at once comendable and too-limited, which opened the way to events for our more subtle senusement. His remarks were commendable (if one who known infinitely less about Boston may be allowed to comment) in that they restored dramatically the spirits of a police force low in morale, bitter because of what it took to be still one more instance of political opportunism--at its expense, humiliated by sweeping public allegations against its professional honor: Integrity in the law. (Until proved, the cruelest allegation against a professor is sophistry; against a fighter, cowardice; against a policeman crime.) Cardinal Cushing's wisdom lay in restoring honor to the force, without which the force has no professional use. The limitation of his wisdom lay in the short-term, immediate nature of his aid and the unsolved problems it does not address.

The subtler amusement derives from the reactions of the other wonderful person ages in the perennial Boston drama: Protestant and liberal spokesmen. For in this act, the Catholic Cardinal took the lines on liberality, conscience as against law, and warm tolerance; the Protestant and the liberal joined in the moral lines, upolding the written law. The Catholic pointed out the hypocrisies in the present confused system of federal, state, and civic gambling laws, and help up a case not simple but complex. In his theology, he said, men are free to gamble if they choose; and he may have been hinting that he failed to see why his conscience should be bound by other people's moral requirements, and that perhaps the issue of gambling laws should be reopened au fond.

It seems positively delightful to have a new issue like gambling to argue about, instead of the laws on Sunday work, indecent movies, contraceptives, and parochial schools. It's amusing to watch the litigants putting on each other's shoes and picking up each other's folls in the confusion. And for the sake of ending old sterectypes, I hope we never get them straightened out.

The editorial in The Christian Science Monitor was a delight, too. Gambling is morally wrong. It said in effect (no matter what certain parties say) because it is unproductive. Ah. the world of productivity, and the would of those who love life, its foolishness, its whimsical useless tomfoolery--will ever the two come to meet? Is a human moral vision able to manage both?

Cardinal Cushing perhaps erred in judgment in speaking only of the immediate morale of the force and not also of the larger question of political corruption in Boston; some of his words--like "betrayal"--may have smacked too much to non-Boston-Irish of local pride; but he showed his genuine humanity. A few quiet chuckles about the funny things that happened at the ball and afterwards might help us all to genital humanity; and the long, ugly business of reform might seem easier. we might take as the reform's slogan: "Wasn't it a ball!" Michael J. Nevak 20