John Joseph O'Connor (January 15, 1920 – May 3, 2000) was an American Catholic prelate who served as Archbishop of New York from 1984 until his death in 2000, and was made a cardinal in 1985.
O'Connor previously served as a U.S. Navy chaplain (1952 to 1979), including four years as chief of chaplains, as an auxiliary bishop of the Military Vicariate of the United States (1979 to 1983), and as Bishop of Scranton from 1983 to 1984.
John O'Connor was born in Philadelphia on January 15, 1920, the fourth of five children of Thomas J. O'Connor, and Dorothy Magdalene (née Gomple) O'Connor. Thomas was a painter and Dorothy was the daughter of Gustave Gumpel, a kosher butcher and Jewish rabbi. In 2014, it was discovered that Dorothy was baptized a Catholic at age 19 and that the couple wed one year later.
O'Connor attended public schools in Philadelphia until his junior year of high school, when he enrolled in West Philadelphia Catholic High School for Boys. Having decided to become a priest, he then enrolled at St. Charles Borromeo Seminary in Wynnewood, Pennsylvania.
After graduating from St. Charles, O'Connor was ordained a priest for the Archdiocese of Philadelphia on December 15, 1945, in Philadelphia by Auxiliary Bishop Hugh L. Lamb. After his 1945 ordination, the archdiocese assigned O'Connor as a faculty member at St. James High School in Chester, Pennsylvania. During this seven-year period, O'Connor obtained a Master of Arts degree in advanced ethics from Villanova University in Philadelphia and a Master of Arts degree in clinical psychology from the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C.
O'Connor joined the United States Navy Chaplain Corps in 1952 during the Korean War.He was eventually named rear admiral and chief of chaplains of the Navy in 1975.He obtained approval for the establishment of the RP [Religious Program Specialist] Enlisted Rating and oversaw the process of standing up this rating. The RP rating provided chaplains with a dedicated enlisted community. The Vatican named O'Connor an honorary prelate of his holiness on October 27, 1966.
O'Connor received a doctorate in political science from Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., where he studied under future United Nations ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick. Kirkpatrick said of O'Connor that he was "... surely one of the two or three smartest graduate students I've ever had."
Auxiliary Bishop of the Military Vicariate US
On April 24, 1979, Pope John Paul II appointed O'Connor as an auxiliary bishop of the Military Vicariate for the United States and titular bishop of Cursola. He was consecrated to the episcopate on May 27, 1979, at St. Peter's Basilica in Rome by John Paul himself, with Cardinals Duraisamy Lourdusamy and Eduardo Somalo acting as co-consecrators.
On May 6, 1983, John Paul II named O'Connor as bishop of Scranton; he was installed in that position on June 29, 1983.
On January 26, 1984, after the death of Cardinal Terence Cooke, O'Connor was appointed archbishop of New York and administrator of the Military Vicariate by John Paul II; O'Connor was installed on March 19, 1984.
O'Connor was elevated to cardinal in the May 25, 1985, consistory, with the titular church of Santi Giovanni e Paolo in Rome (the traditional one for the Archbishop of New York from 1946 to 2009).
On December 10, 1989, 4,500 members of ACT UP and Women's Health Action and Mobilization (WHAM) demonstrated at St. Patrick's Cathedral in Manhattan to voice their opposition to O'Connor's positions on HIV/AIDS education, the distribution of condoms in public schools, and abortion rights for women. Police arrested 43 protestors from inside the cathedral.
Throughout his tenure as archbishop of New York, Cardinal O'Connor advocated on behalf of many groups whom he believed to be downtrodden, but there was no group that he advocated for more strongly than the unborn. To that end, O'Connor started a religious order of women known as the Sisters of Life, which still exists today.
O'Connor had a close relationship with Pope John Paul II, and both leaders were very similar in their emphasis, including a focus on the sanctity of human life from conception to natural death. When naming O'Connor the Archbishop of New York in 1984, the pope is purported to have said "I want someone like myself in New York". In 1995, for the 50th anniversary of the founding of the United Nations, Pope Saint John Paul II visited New York and while there, O'Connor hosted him at Saint Patrick's Cathedral for a rosary service on October 7, 1995 for which O'Connor appointed Joseph Polchinski as one of the servers.
When O'Connor reached the retirement age for bishops of 75 years in January 1995, he submitted his resignation to Pope John Paul II as required by canon law. However the pope did not accept the resignation, and O'Connor continued to serve as Archbishop of New York until his death.
O'Connor was diagnosed in 1999 with a brain tumor, and died in the archbishop's residence in Manhattan on May 3, 2000. He was interred in the crypt beneath the main altar of St. Patrick's Cathedral. His funeral was presided over by Cardinal Secretary of State Angelo Sodano. At O'Connor's request, Cardinal Bernard F. Law delivered the homily and Cardinal William W. Baum the eulogy. Attendees at O'Connor's funeral included:
Secretary-General of the United Nations Kofi Annan