Authors: J. Anthony Lukas
By century’s end, however, the excesses of France’s own revolution—and fears that they would spread across the Atlantic—brought Boston’s prosperous Federalists a new appreciation for the social discipline exercised by the Roman Church. Indeed, as Irish laborers came to outnumber French artisans in Boston’s Catholic community, the Yankee ascendancy looked increasingly to the Church as a stabilizing force. By 1848, the Irish had appropriated the episcopal
seat, not to relinquish it for a century and a quarter. But the first Irish bishops—John Fitzpatrick (1848–66) and John Williams (1866–1907)—were cautious men, intensely aware that they represented a scorned minority. Fitzpatrick was admitted to Yankee society—joining the Thursday Evening Club, becoming warmly known to Protestants and Catholics alike as “Bishop John.” By contrast, John Williams was so austere that archdiocesan historians were “tempted to conclude that the chill of New England had frozen his Irish blood and turned a Celt into a somewhat extreme example of a well-known Yankee type.” Yet so unsure was he of Yankee toleration that he never wore clerical garb and kept his churches off main thoroughfares. As for the indignities inflicted on his flock, the only remedy Williams could offer was relentless assimilation. Boston’s Catholic journal took its cue from him when it admonished: “The good parish is remarkable for its orderly, well-dressed people, who take a pride in appearing decent, of being proper in their homes and conversation, and no brawls or tumults are ever heard within its walls.”
Only with the advent of William Henry O’Connell in 1907 did the Archdiocese begin to exhibit the aggressive self-confidence already apparent in the politics of Honey Fitz and James Michael Curley. For too long, the new Archbishop believed, Boston’s Church had been content to remain on the defensive, refuting the indictments brought against it by Protestant orthodoxy. Now, with the Irish triumphant in the temporal sphere, O’Connell proclaimed a new Church Militant. “The Puritan has passed,” he declared in 1908. “The Catholic remains. The city where a century ago he came unwanted he has made his own!”
To the long-suffering Irish, his was a rousing message: no longer need you feel inferior, no longer need you model yourself after the Yankees, for you come from something older, deeper, and better—the Church of Rome. Educated at Rome’s North American College, returning eleven years later to be its rector, O’Connell moved in the Vatican’s inner circles. Impressed by the pageantry, pomp, and power of the Holy See, he henceforth took its lead in all matters, large and small. Enlisting in Leo XIII’s crusade against “Americanism”—the heterodox notion that the American Church should adapt itself to native conditions and democratic practices—O’Connell became the country’s principal advocate of papal supremacy. Particularly after he was elevated to Cardinal in 1911, he applied those same principles to Boston, centralizing all Church authority, becoming a miniature pope in his own realm. “When I ask you to do something,” he once told the faithful, “trust me and do it.”
He gave physical expression to this new confidence by taking Boston’s Church “out of the Catacombs.” Since the middle of the previous century, most of the city’s Catholic institutions had huddled together in the South End. When the Cathedral of the Holy Cross was built on Washington Street in 1860, that neighborhood seemed about to become the city’s most fashionable, yet even before the great Gothic structure was completed, the
haut monde
had drifted off into the Back Bay and the Cathedral was left standing in a dreary welter of dank saloons, livery stables, and dilapidated tenements. Nothing so reflected
the contempt in which Yankee authorities then held the Irish community as their decision in 1898 to run the Elevated’s trestle down the middle of Washington Street, where its dark latticework buried the Cathedral’s broad façade in perpetual gloom. The trains thundered by every four to seven minutes, drowning out sections of the Mass, rattling the chalice on the altar, setting Irish teeth on edge.
The great Cathedral—larger than those of Strasbourg, Dublin, Venice, or Vienna—was too big an investment to abandon, so O’Connell left it where it was, but in recompense, he set out to build, on hilltops surrounding Boston, a little Rome such as he remembered from the hills of the Eternal City. First Boston College moved to an estate in Chestnut Hill; then the Passionist Monastery, the Cenacle Convent, and St. Elizabeth’s Hospital to Nevin’s Hill in Brighton. Finally, with a $2.2 million bequest from the theater magnate A. Paul Keith, O’Connell built himself an Italian Renaissance palazzo and a matching chancery on forty lushly landscaped acres in Brighton. In 1931, dedicating still another bucolic retreat, he declared: “On every hilltop now for miles around gleams the sacred sign of our redemption. Around and about the whole city, God has set up his fortresses of sacrifice and prayer.”
Few could detect much sacrifice in the Cardinal’s own imperial style. Relishing his role as Roman proconsul, he encouraged homage. On his return from investiture as Cardinal, twenty-five of the city’s foremost businessmen—all of them Protestants—presented him with a gold casket containing an illuminated Latin address and a check for $25,000. The three-story mansion where he dwelled was one of Boston’s most opulent houses, and when O’Connell moved in, he brought with him his houseman, Peppino; his coachman, Pio Zappa; and his music master, Pio DeLuca—all, like the terrazzo floors and tapestries, imported from Italy. The Cardinal entertained lavishly. At his dinner table, he discouraged the use of English, preferring Latin (the language of the Church) or French (the language of the Court). When he left his mansion—to spend Friday afternoons at the Boston Symphony, for example—it was in a giant Pierce-Arrow, accompanied by his black poodle, Moro. He summered in Marblehead, high on a hillside overlooking the harbor (after he ordered young picnickers off the rocks, a wag posted a sign which read: “The world is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof, but the rocks belong to the Cardinal”). Each winter he embarked for his Bahamas estate, taking so many such holidays that he became known in certain Boston circles as “Gangplank Bill.” Nor did O’Connell display any hesitation in sharing this wealth—and power—with his large family. He even made his nephew chancellor of the Archdiocese, an act of nepotism which backfired when the young priest secretly married. The information was leaked by O’Connell’s enemies to Pope Benedict XV, who severely reprimanded the Cardinal for permitting such indiscretions.
O’Connell’s sophistication contrasted sharply with the austere morality he demanded from most of his flock. Frankly elitist, he believed it was “monstrous for the masses to have an equal vote with men of property and education.” The Catholics who filled his churches must be held to strict standards of
behavior and shielded—through Boston’s rigid censorship—from such immoral influences as Eugene O’Neill and D. H. Lawrence. Unable to analyze difficult issues, the poor required “thought ready-made.” Only Catholics of wealth and breeding—“those who were running the world”—were entitled to a “high culture.”
By then, of course, O’Connell had a hand in running not only Boston but the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. So complete was his control of Church machinery, so thorough his dominion over one million Catholics, that few politicians dared cross him. The most important question on any matter of public policy was “What does Lake Street think?”—a reference to the Cardinal’s chancery address. In the corridors of the State House, O’Connell was known simply as “Number One.”
The most resolutely conservative of America’s bishops, O’Connell often voted Republican, a damnable heresy at that time in Boston’s Irish neighborhoods. He adamantly opposed the Child Labor Amendment, labeling it “Soviet legislation” because it would infringe parental authority over child rearing (the amendment was soundly defeated at Massachusetts’ polls). When Francisco Franco’s planes killed a thousand civilians in Barcelona, O’Connell called the Generalissimo a fighter for “Christian civilization in Spain.” A perfervid critic of the New Deal, he repeatedly spoke out against “atheistic Communism.”
Yet, when it served his purposes, O’Connell could retreat behind his scarlet vestments. He resisted pressure to appeal for clemency in the Sacco-Vanzetti case, responding elliptically, “The justice of God is perfect and in the end, He and His Ways, mysterious as they are, are our hope and salvation.” He assailed Father Charles Coughlin, ordering that radios in the rectories be turned off when the neo-fascist “radio priest” came on the air. But just as Pope Pius XII failed to condemn Hitler’s concentration camps, so when bands of Irish youths ranged Blue Hill Avenue (they called it “Jew Hill Avenue”), harassing and beating Jews, the Cardinal was conspicuously silent.
Only rarely did the Cardinal intervene directly in electoral politics, but he made no secret of his distaste for the bumptious populist James Michael Curley. In 1937, Curley was running for mayor in a field of six, one of whom was School Committeeman Maurice J. Tobin. Curley was considered a shoo-in, but on election morning, the Boston
Post
—the favorite newspaper of Boston’s Irish—replaced its normal front-page quote from Shakespeare or Goethe with something more topical. “Voters of Boston,” read the notice prominently displayed above the masthead. “Cardinal O’Connell, in speaking to the Catholic Alumni Association, said, ‘The walls are raised against honest men in civil life.’ You can break down these walls by voting for an honest, clean, competent young man, MAURICE TOBIN, today. He will redeem the city and take it out of the hands of those who have been responsible for graft and corruption …” When the paper hit the streets, Curley’s camp dispatched an emissary to the Cardinal’s residence to explain that careless readers, not paying close attention to the punctuation, might conclude that His Eminence, in remarks
delivered months before, was actually endorsing Tobin. The Curley forces requested a brief communiqué from the Cardinal disavowing any such intentions, but O’Connell kept the emissary waiting for nearly an hour before sending word that he was too busy to see anyone. Tobin beat Curley that day by an astonishing 25,250 votes.
Such was the awesome power which Richard J. Cushing inherited on September 28, 1944. But Cushing was a very different man from the refined and ruthless prince of the Church he succeeded. Born to a Cork blacksmith and a Waterford housemaid on Third Street in South Boston, he never lost the raffish air he had acquired on Southie’s wharves and sidewalks. If not for World War I, Cushing might have followed O’Connell’s road to Rome and there acquired a cosmopolitan patina. But never in Rome until after he became Archbishop, he remained a distinctively American churchman. Whereas O’Connell represented the Roman Catholic Church, imperial and imperious, hostile to much of the American experience, Cushing came to personify a native faith, consistent with the pragmatic, self-reliant, and democratic spirit of the New World.
Not long after assuming office, he pledged to refrain from “all argument with our non-Catholic neighbors and from all purely defensive talk about Catholicism.” That position was tested early by a Jesuit priest named Leonard Feeney, who accused the Jesuits’ own Boston College of heresy for teaching that salvation was possible outside the Catholic Church. Cushing withdrew Feeney’s priestly authority, but the dissident only intensified his crusade, taking to the Boston Common, where he denounced Jews as “horrid, degenerate, hook-nosed perverts.” Cushing had lived through the Christian Front’s wartime xenophobia and had no intention of presiding over its revival. As a fund raiser, he had long cultivated wealthy Jews; moreover, his sister had married a Jew, whom the Cardinal called “the best Christian I know.” Asked about Feeney, he would rasp impatiently, “Nobody can tell me that Christ died on Calvary for any select group!” In 1953, the Vatican upheld Cushing’s stand by excommunicating the renegade priest.
But Cushing had a polemical streak too. He jousted peevishly with Protestant critics like Paul Blanshard, and on at least one issue—the menace of international Communism—he was as zealous as his predecessor. The anti-Communist crusade held a special appeal for American Catholics; intensely Catholic
and
American, it demonstrated at last the compatibility of faith and patriotism. As the cold war deepened, New York’s Francis Cardinal Spellman and his assistant, Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, fulminated against “Satan-inspired Communists” and “anti-Christian minds drenched and drugged in the devil’s cauldron.” Cushing stood squarely in that tradition. After Yugoslavia’s Archbishop Stepinac was imprisoned, Cushing denounced the “bloody and barbaric” behavior of the “Red Fascists.” Soon he broadened his indictment to include “the parlor pinks, the fellow travelers, and out-and-out Communists who thrive in our midst.” He formed a close friendship with J. Edgar Hoover, who often assigned FBI men to escort him on his travels. He once called
Robert Welch the most “dedicated anti-Communist in the country” and endorsed Welch’s John Birch Society. As for Senator Joseph McCarthy—who enjoyed massive support among Boston’s Irish Catholics—Cushing never explicitly backed him, but scrupulously avoided anything that might be taken for criticism. Asked for his opinion of the Senator, he once responded, “The whole thing depends on how you look at Communism. If you look upon it as one of the greatest evils that has attempted to undermine Western civilization, naturally you do everything you can to save our way of life from the inroads of evil.”
During those early years, Cushing seemed torn by conflicting impulses—at times pulled toward a new ecumenical openness, at times toward an irascible ghetto Catholicism. What resolved that tension, putting a distinctive stamp on his regime, was the powerful influence of “the two Johns”—John Fitzgerald Kennedy and Pope John XXIII—the first redefining what it meant to be Catholic in America, the second what it meant to be Catholic at all.
When Cushing first met Joseph P. Kennedy in the mid-thirties, they didn’t much care for each other. “The trouble with you two,” a friend remarked, “is you’re like peas in a pod.” Soon the financier and the priest discovered some mutual interests—money, politics, and anti-Communism, in that order. In August 1946, during his first congressional campaign, Jack Kennedy presented Cushing with a family check for $650,000 to build the Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr., Memorial Hospital, the largest gift the Archdiocese had yet received and one calculated to please the district’s Catholic voters. In years to come, the Kennedys added millions more for a whole array of hospitals, homes, and Catholic centers. According to one of Cushing’s principal financial aides, the Cardinal worked out a cozy arrangement with the senior Kennedy: whenever the Ambassador wished, Cushing kicked back fifty cents on the dollar, “laundered” money available for any purpose the Kennedys might select, usually politics.