O'Malley picks cathedral rectory residence over a 'fancy pad'

National Catholic Reporter, August 29, 2003 by Dennis Coday

BOSTON -- Speculation over the new Boston archbishop's choice of domicile ended with Archbishop Sean O'Malley announcing he will live in the rectory of the cathedral and give up the more luxurious official residence. "A bishop should be close to his cathedral," O'Malley wrote Aug. 8 in The Pilot, the archdiocesan newspaper. "The parish is the venue of the pastoral life of the diocese and living in a rectory is a statement about this reality."

He said his predecessors "were not worldly men who sought a 'fancy pad,'" but were "uninterested in material things." He said they lived in the official residence in a tradition begun by Cardinal William O'Connell (archbishop from 1907-44).

"There was a day when many of the trappings surrounding the bishop were an expression of the longing of immigrants," he wrote. "It was the way Catholics said: 'Our church is an important institution and we are important.' "The church no longer needs all the symbols of the past, wrote O'Malley, a Capuchin Franciscan, "especially when those symbols now seem ambiguous at best and a contradiction of some of our gospel values at worst."