Father & Son

Viva il Presidente! Viva il Presidente! rang the streets of Castel Gandolfo, the Papal summer residence, as excited Italian villagers last week cheered the arrival of a man they thought was president of the U.S.

No Catholic has ever been elected President of the U. S. Only two Catholics have ever been appointed Chief Justice (Roger B. Taney and Edward D. White) and only one sits on the U. S. Supreme Court today (Pierce Butler). Only Catholic in Episcopalian Franklin Roosevelt's Cabinet is Postmaster General Farley. Only Catholic ever to be nominated for President by a major party was Alfred Emanuel Smith. Many a U. S. Catholic still believes that it was for his Catholicism alone, and not his Wetness and his Bowery accent, that Al Smith was politically crucified. Certainly the whispering campaign against him on this ground and the absurd charge, openly cartooned by such sheets as the KKKlannish Fellowship Forum (see cut), that he would "set up the Pope in the White House," earned for Al Smith a Catholic martyr's crown. Year after his defeat he received the University of Notre Dame's Laetare-Medal, an award seldom given a politician and the highest honor the Catholic Church in the U. S. can bestow upon a Catholic layman. At Castel Gandolfo last week arrived Al Smith, on the pilgrimage which every good Catholic hopes to make before he dies.

Greeted Pope Pius XI: "I am glad to see you because I have heard so much about you."

For the Brown Derby and cigar with which he had had himself photographed on his arrival in Rome, Al Smith had substituted, before his audience, the required full dress and top hat. Kneeling, he received the Papal blessing, then had a chance to chat privately with His Holiness, with Bishop Ralph L. Hayes, rector of Rome's North American College, interpreting. To Pius XI, Mr. Smith offered a ten-inch gold model of the Empire State Building, volunteering the dimensions of his skyscraper when the Holy Father confessed that he had never ascended a structure higher than the Eiffel Tower. The Pope presented a silver-framed pastel of himself autographed "Toto corde benedicens,"-- a pearl rosary and a relic of the Little Flower to Mrs. Smith, and a Good Shepherd medal to both.

After receiving Mr. Smith, Pius XI gave a general audience for some 400 newly weds and pilgrims from the U. S., India, France, Germany, Canada and Spain. He honored Mr. Smith by seating him in front of the Papal throne and intoning to the throng: "We have with us today a beautiful and worthy representative of America in the person of Mr. Smith, who does honor to all he represents in America and above all to his name and profession as a son of the Catholic Church. ... A man about whom there has been much discussion in important U. S. organizations and about whom there is still considerable talk whenever there is anything very important to that great country."

Two days later Al Smith found himself at a student luncheon at the North American College. Exclaimed he: "So this is Rome! I've read about it, I've heard about it and I've thought a great deal about it. I was even unjustly accused at one time of attempting to take His Holiness away from it." The audience with the Pope, he declared, "paid a thousand times for all the trouble we had getting here, all the arranging we had to go through, the pictures I had to have taken. . . .

"When the Bishop and I were seated at the desk where he had motioned us to be seated, His Holiness rose from his seat and walked over to a cabinet to get something. He then remembered that what he wanted was in another place. So he walked over there, took out what he wanted and walked back to his desk with gifts for Mrs. Smith and myself.

"I have never been taken aback for want of something to say in my whole life and I have met many prominent people. But for the first time in my life there was nothing I could say. And after I left, His Holiness must have said to himself, 'How did that fellow make all those speeches?' "

In his piece for the New York Herald Tribune, Al Smith wrote: "I was never prouder than I was today, when I could call him 'Father,' and he called me 'Son.' "

Snapped Imperial Wizard Dr. Hiram Wesley Evans of the Ku Klux Klan in Atlanta: "Al Smith is just a memory."

-- "Blessing with my whole heart."

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