Catholic, Protestant and Jew. Muslim, Unitarian and agnostic. All celebrated Cardinal Joseph Louis Bernardin's life Thursday evening in the cathedral where he was installed as Cincinnati archbishop 24 years ago.
''He was as close to a saint as I'll ever see,'' said Paula Bischoff, of Brookville, Ind., as she arrived for the 90-minute memorial mass.
Or as David Andre, of Norwood, put it, ''He was one of the best examples of what a priest is supposed to be."
They were among an estimated 1,400 who filled the pews and balcony and lined the side aisles of St. Peter in Chains Cathedral.
''It was a good life and a good death,'' Cincinnati Archbishop Daniel E. Pilarczyk said of his predecessor. ''We take comfort in our conviction that God's response will be divinely generous."
Cardinal Bernardin was archbishop of Cincinnati from 1972 until Pope John Paul II sent him to Chicago in 1982 and made him a cardinal the next year. The 68-year-old cardinal died of pancreatic cancer on Nov. 14 in Chicago and he was buried there two days ago.
Imam Ilyas Nashid, leader of the Cincinnati Islamic Center in Kennedy Heights, knew the cardinal only by reputation, but it was enough to draw him to the cathedral Thursday evening.
''I'm here to pay my respects,'' the imam said. ''I always respected him tremendously and he was a great religious leader."
Two years after he arrived in Cincinnati as the nation's youngest Roman Catholic archbishop, the churchman became president of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops.
That took him to the Vatican where, as a representative of the American church, he met and befriended the archbishop of Krakow, Poland, who later became pope.
Not long after, in a virtually unheralded visit, the Krakow cardinal made good on a promise to visit Cincinnati.
For a quarter century, most of it during John Paul's papacy, Cardinal Bernardin was a leading interpreter of American Catholicism among brother bishops and Vatican officials.
''In years to come, we will continue to feel his impact on us as individuals, as a Catholic society, and as a broader society,'' said Sister of Charity Elizabeth Cashman, who worked closely with the archbishop in Cincinnati.
He also helped almost 500,000 Catholics in the 19-county Archdiocese of Cincinnati understand and embrace the sometimes-jarring changes legislated by the Second Vatican Council.
One was a new opening to non-Catholics and it won him repeated honors from the National Conference, formerly the National Conference of Christians and Jews.
''He took a real out-front role,'' said R. C. ''Chip'' Harrod, executive director of the Cincinnati-area office of the National Conference. ''He helped put Vatican II into practice.''
Michael Rapp, executive director of the Jewish Community Relations Council, came to the memorial Mass for the cardinal ''out of respect to his colleagues and friends in the Catholic community and to celebrate the life of a man whose faith was rooted in a particular community but whose mission transcended particularism."
Where Mr. Harrod valued the cardinal's upbeat interfaith and ecumenical roles in Cincinnati and Chicago, Mr. Rapp praised the cardinal's recent speech at Hebrew University in Jerusalem where ''he so vigorously condemned anti-Semitism and reached out to the Jewish community."
The Rev. David Lowry, a Presbyterian and director of Old St. George center near the University of Cincinnati, said he knew the archbishop briefly ''but that was enough to feel close to him."
When it was time to preach the homily, Archbishop Pilarczyk began by expressing what must have been on many minds. ''There doesn't seem to be much left to say about Cardinal Bernardin,'' he said.
So, as the cardinal would have done, Archbishop Pilarczyk used the occasion to teach.
''We believe that death is not only an end, but also a glorious beginning,'' he said. ''Death and new life exist in tension with each other."
Neither focus on death at the expense of the resurrection, he said, nor concentrate solely on the world to come, because that would reduce ''the years we expend in this earthly life (to) an exercise in futility, time spent in the waiting room till the real action begins."
That said, Archbishop Pilarczyk closed with an anecdote about the late Cardinal John Dearden of Detroit, the most powerful of Archbishop Bernardin's mentors.
''When I first became a bishop, Cardinal Dearden took me aside. Cardinal Dearden was one of Cardinal Bernardin's closest and dearest friends and Cardinal Dearden said to me, 'Dan, now that you are Joe's auxiliary (bishop), you really ought to see to it that he doesn't work so hard. Find some ways to get him out and make him relax.'
''I tried to do what I could but I'm not sure I was very successful. Cardinal Bernardin wasn't a golfer nor was I. He didn't play cards. He didn't seem to enjoy going to the symphony very often.
''But I learned that what he did enjoy was going out for dinner to some nice place where he could enjoy the company of his friends.
''If we believe what Jesus told his disciples in the gospel reading we heard this evening, it doesn't seem inappropriate to think that one week ago today, our heavenly Father put on his apron and said to our dear brother, 'Welcome home, Joe. Come on in and sit down. Your dinner is waiting.'''
Published Nov. 22, 1996.
