Keeler Pioneered a New Era in Catholic-Jewish Relations

As Cardinal William H. Keeler’s gentle soul is laid to rest, it’s worth remembering how the archbishop of Baltimore worked hard over his 86 years to strengthen the bonds of friendship between his Catholic community and the Jews.

It’s one measure of his commitment to bonding among differing Judeo-Christian faiths that we take such relationships for granted today. But Keeler, with his emphasis on healing, was an integral part of that post-war effort to end the public antagonisms that lingered at least since the era of Father Charles Coughlin’s poisonous radio broadcasts.

Cardinal Keeler was a kindly man whose tender exterior belied a brave and unflinching moral center.

The obituaries this week give him proper credit for the courageous issues he fought. For example, in the shameful sexual scandals in his church in which predatory priests took sexual advantage of children, and the church further disgraced itself by covering up the outrages, Cardinal Keeler was a rare figure who remembered his values went well beyond protecting the mother church.

Though at first he thought the story overblown – a media “feeding frenzy,” he called it – he soon realized the widespread extent of the abuse, as well as the added institutional shame.

He was the first bishop to publicly identify outlaw priests. On his website of the Baltimore archdiocese, Keeler posted the names of dozens of the offending clergy. He also gave an accounting of more than $5 million that the church here paid in settlements and legal fees.

But, behind the scenes, he was also a healing figure for Catholics and Jews who still recalled the anti-Semitic broadcasts of Father Coughlin, whose nationwide radio diatribes filled the airwaves in the late 1930s, and whose viewpoint lingered in the air for years thereafter.

Rabbi James Rudin, the senior inter-religious adviser of the American Jewish Committee, told the New York Times that Cardinal Keeler helped clear the air of such notions.

“He came from the pioneering generation of post-1965 Catholic leaders,” Rudin said. “There has been more positive done in Catholic-Jewish relations in the last 50 years than in the first 1,900, and Cardinal Keeler was the chief architect of that.”

That’s no small gesture in a statewide diocese with roughly half a million Catholic congregants.

A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books, most recently “Front Stoops in the Fifties: Baltimore Legends Come of Age” (Johns Hopkins University Press).