America in Rome

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"I think the time has come to fill the sad vacancies in the Sacred College." Thus Pope Pius XII this week addressed about 30 oldtime cardinals who had foregathered, along with the Pontiff, in the Vatican's Consistory Hall. His Holiness read the names of 32 prelates whose domains were scattered from Mozambique to Berlin, from Armenia to Australia (TIME, Jan. 7).

"Quid vobis videtur?" ("What do you think?") inquired the Pope. The Princes of the Church stood up, removed their red skullcaps, bowed in assent. The papal proposal was not a surprise to them: the Pope's intentions had been announced to all the world two months ago.

The ceremony opened the five days of public pageantry and secret meetings which made up the Church's first Consistory since 1940. The ceremonies, a reminder to the world of the venerable traditions and teachings of the Church of Rome, had been preceded last week by a no less significant reminder of how fantastically the world had changed since the Sacred College first met in the 12th Century: two giant planes had brought to Rome the new U.S. cardinals--Archbishops John J. Glennon of St. Louis. Samuel A. Stritch of Chicago, Edward Mooney of Detroit and Francis J. Spellman of New York.

That arrival from the skies marked the arrival of the U.S., its principles and policies, as a major force in the temporal and even spiritual policies of the Vatican. Rome, which once looked uncertainly toward the American Church, today looks to the U.S. as: 1) the world's most effective counterweight to the newly emergent power of Russia; 2) the world's greatest reservoir of food and goods to forestall the further demoralization of Europe; 3) the world's greatest embodiment of the form of government which offers the Church its best milieu for survival--democracy.

This represents, in sum, the greatest reorientation in Church policy since the Council of Trent.

As a political experiment, the U.S. has been viewed with misgivings by many European prelates ever since 1776. The strange new republic seemed based upon philosophical premises of a heretical nature and imbued with an alarming spirit of independence, not confined to temporal affairs.

There was also, in European Catholic circles, a fastidious tendency to identify Catholicism with Europe itself. Wrote Englishman Hilaire Belloc: "The culture of the U.S. is, from its original religion and by its momentum and whole tradition, opposed to the Catholic Church."

Until as late as 1908 the U.S. was regarded by Rome as a missionary province--it had to import priests to care for the faithful, money to support their activities. The Vatican had permitted the U.S. clergy to choose the first three of their bishops, beginning with John Carroll of Baltimore in 1789, had then taken alarm. For the next century, U.S. bishops were chosen by Rome's Society for the Propagation of the Faith, and those selected were most often either Irish or French in background.

No Flagellations. A typical problem was the choice of priests and bishops for the large bodies of Catholic immigrants: foreign-language groups, especially the Germans, demanded a clergy of their own origin and language. A large part of the hierarchy, led by the Irish, considered this a dangerous trend. They knew that Catholicism in the U.S. labored under a widespread suspicion of being an alien creed, that the Church could prosper only by doing its utmost to Americanize the immigrants and adapting its policies to those of the young democracy.

In 1884 the Catholic World summarized the U.S. bishops' pastoral letter: "The hierarchy . . . share the conviction that American political institutions are in advance of those of Europe in helping a man to save his soul. . . ." Archbishop John Ireland of St. Paul was more truculent: "An honest ballot and social decorum will do more for God's glory and the salvation of souls than midnight flagellations or Compestellan pilgrimages."

This attitude scandalized some European churchmen, who smelled an "American heresy." French ecclesiastics, to whom democracy meant Jacobinism and anticlericalism, were especially outraged. They could not forget France's great bloody adventure in democracy, when revolutionaries in 1793 seized Notre Dame Cathedral as a "Temple of Reason," and crowned an actress as "Goddess of Reason."

The American Heresy. U.S. Catholics were deeply hurt when Leo XIII, in an Apostolic Letter to Baltimore's Cardinal Gibbons in 1899, at last felt it necessary to condemn heretical "Americanism." Gist of the alleged errors: "Spiritual direction . . . was less necessary since in an era of liberty, the Holy Ghost would guide the individual soul. . . ." U.S. bishops loudly denied that such heresy had ever tainted U.S. Catholicism.

Vatican and other European clerics had also frowned deeply at the U.S. principle of separation of Church and State, which had been condemned by Leo XIII. But U.S. Catholics, uneasily aware that they were a minority, were early convinced that such a separation was their own strongest safeguard. Though Leo's views are still repeated by a few academic theologians, they are largely ignored by the U.S. hierarchy.

Catholic Layman Alfred E. Smith could flatly endorse "equality of all Churches, all sects and all beliefs before the law as a matter of right and not as a matter of favor. I believe in the absolute separation of Church and State." Even those who safeguard their orthodoxy most carefully need not believe that Church and State, though their union be a Christian ideal sub specie aeternitatis, can be prudently wed until the final earthly triumph of the City of God--which may perhaps arrive just before Judgment Day.

Leo XIII, however, was not unwilling to learn about Americanism. He took back his ban on Catholic participation in the first strong U.S. trade-union movement, the Knights of Labor, after Cardinal Gibbons pointed out that: 1) U.S. unions were not infected with anticlericalism; and 2) the papal ban would only drive Catholic workers out of the Church.*

The Vatican has since learned a good deal more about Americanism, chiefly through contrast with Europe's long, convulsive decline toward economic ruin and moral anarchy. In the 19th Century, writes Historian Joseph McSorley of the Paulist Fathers, "clashes between Church and State occurred in every important country except the United States of America." In the 20th Century, "a large proportion of the working classes turned their backs upon the Church. . . ."

Communist Russia made no secret of its implacable hostility to religion, scarcely bothered to conceal its low regard for human life. Neither did Nazi Germany nor Fascist Italy, which made a mockery of their concordats with Rome. World War II by no means ended the totalitarian threat to Europe. The Soviet glacier edged deep into the old continent, froze such Catholic nations as Poland and Hungary in its grip. In the rest of Europe large masses still looked to Communism for salvation--or at least for retribution. In the long perspective of the Church, it was not hard to envision a Sovietized continent.

To meet this crisis, the Vatican looks to the ideological and material support of the U.S. To enlist U.S. support, it looks chiefly to the devout but uniquely American career and character of Francis Cardinal Spellman.

The American Touch. Like few prelates, Spellman had a secular education in the public schools of Whitman, Mass. He delivered groceries, peddled papers, played baseball and was a trolley-car conductor at an age when most of the solemn little Italian boys who are now his contemporaries in the Church had already begun their education for the priesthood.

He was a good but undistinguished student at Fordham, a Jesuit college but no seminary. He wrote poetry, excelled in Latin, helped build a wireless set as a member of the Secchi Scientific Society. He was a careful dresser, and liked convivial company.

His decision to enter the priesthood surprised college friends. The clergy at once marked him as able, and Boston's William Cardinal O'Connell sent him to Rome's North American College, where young Americans of exceptional promise are given the Church's most careful training. He developed a scholarly flair, impressed a tall, eloquent professor of theology named Borgongini-Duca. Spellman too was impressed: when he returned to the U.S. as a priest in 1916, he translated two of his master's books of devotions.

In Rome again in 1925, as the first U.S. priest to serve as assistant to the Papal Secretary of State, Spellman became a leader in the $1,000,000 playground system erected in Rome by the Knights of Columbus, startled dignified Italian clerics and Italian urchins by his boxing and skill at tennis.

He Americanized the Vatican press department, for the first time issued papal documents to newsmen in all important languages. (This week, with typical American awareness of the press, he agreed to argue with Vatican authorities that over 100 secular reporters and photographers should be admitted to the Hall of Benedictions when Pope Pius presents the biretta to the new cardinals.) He also became the Vatican's first radio adviser, followed the Pope's first broadcast with an English translation.

In 1929 he awed his colleagues with a typical American solution to a deadlock in negotiations between the Papacy and Italy over the sovereignty of the Vatican: both Church and State claimed jurisdiction over marriages. Spellman suggested the U.S. procedure--a civil license followed by a religious ceremony.

Two years later he showed his American dash by smuggling to Paris a papal indictment of Fascist attacks upon the Catholic action and youth movement; he turned it over to the A.P. and U.P. for release to the world. In Italy Spellman learned to fly, became the first Catholic bishop to win a pilot's license.

Back in the U.S. in 1932 he showed other American qualities: almost overnight he pulled a bankrupt parish in a Boston suburb out of the red. Much more the administrator than the philosopher, he moved up as Archbishop of New York, richest see in the U.S. (and the world), managed its complex charities and institutions with a sure hand.

During the war he became one of the world's most widely traveled men, covering some 120,000 miles by plane. His four war books sold 300,000 copies; his war-inspired blank verse, popular but undistinguished, appeared in Collier's and Good Housekeeping. In the past three years his writing brought in $250,000, which went to charities. He became the first archbishop to sell a book to Hollywood, when M-G-M decided to film his wartime parable, The Risen Soldier.

Spellman's sure progress in the Church led some to suspect that he was ambitious, a church politician, an organizer who in secular life might have become chairman of the Democratic National Committee. He has never worn his piety on his sleeve, and even in an age of publicity, an archbishop's devotional life is largely a personal matter between him and his God. His rule has been the Biblical injunction: ". . . When thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and -when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret... ." (Matthew 6:6).

A more obvious explanation of Spellman's rise in the Church is that he has qualities the Church wants in its leaders. The hierarchy is always eager to make the most of its personnel, and an industrious young cleric can be sure that a strain of humility will not handicap his rise in the Church Militant. His superiors will see that he learns the art of patience. When Rome first suggested to Cardinal O'Connell that Spellman join the Vatican Secretariat, the Cardinal, who did not always look kindly upon the rising young cleric, kept Spellman in suspense for months before ordering him on his way.

No Primacy. If, as many observers rate him, Spellman is Catholicism's No. 2 man, the position is entirely unofficial. He cannot even be called the leader of U.S. Catholicism, although he has done much to make U.S. Catholicism more American. The red hat itself is a badge of honor, not of sacerdotal rank. Neither Spellman nor the other U.S. cardinals has more power (except to help choose the next Pope) than have their 17 fellow archbishops.

Yet signs are unmistakable that Cardinal Spellman is Pius XII's right-hand man. When Spellman flew into Rome last week, the Holy Father sent his three princely nephews to extend his personal regards. And this week the Pope will give Spellman as his titular church the Church of SS. John and Paul-which he himself held, as Cardinal Pacelli, before he was elected to St. Peter's throne.

Spellman worked with Pacelli for seven years, joined him on mountain-climbing vacations in the Swiss Alps. In 1932 it was Pacelli, then Papal Secretary of State, who consecrated Spellman a bishop. Spellman wore the same vestments Pacelli (and two previous Popes) had worn at his own elevation to the episcopacy.

When Pacelli, with a portable typewriter his most conspicuous piece of luggage, visited the U.S. in 1936, Bishop Spellman guided him on a whirlwind 8,000-mile airplane tour, which included a meeting with Franklin D. Roosevelt. In Boston Pacelli paid a proper call on Cardinal O'Connell, but stopped overnight at Spellman's rectory in Newton Centre.

Cain's Soldiers. Seven weeks after Pacelli's elevation to the Papacy, he announced the appointment of his closest

American friend to succeed Cardinal Hayes as Archbishop of New York. World War II doubled Spellman's value to the Pope as the Vatican and Washington both strove to prevent the war's spread and to precipitate a peace. Spellman was the go-between in discussions which led to Roosevelt's appointment of a "personal representative" at the Vatican.

Pacelli's appointment of Spellman as Military Vicar to the U.S. Armed Forces and chief of some 5,000 Catholic chaplains gave him an unrivaled opportunity to see a world at war. Six times his travels took him to Rome to report.

In 1943, after a visit to Franco Spain, Spellman outraged many Americans by saying in Collier's: "Whatever criticism had been made of General Franco (and it has been considerable), I cannot doubt that he is a man loyal to his God, devoted to his country's welfare. . . ."

Apparently, the Archbishop was aware of the ideological storm he had raised, for this statement was omitted when the article was reprinted in his book Action This Day.

Spellman viewed World War II with a mind trained in tradition, familiar with mankind's ageless history of baseness ("Cycle without end! Once more it is the innocent who die"), but inspired by its possibilities and occasional evidences of goodness. Hitler, he wrote, "makes me think of anti-Christ." Nazi advances reminded him of a "march of the soldier-slaves of Cain, incarnate again."

His war reports reveal: i) a ceaseless apprehension that peace may not bring justice; and 2) a continued preoccupation with "war's cardinal crime," the suffering of children.

Wrote Spellman after one of his wartime tours of Europe:

"Injustice, poverty, disease, and squalor are increasing and spreading. Cruelty is becoming normal, and sadism is as virulent and as contagious to the mind as typhus is to the body. . . .

"Formerly, statesmen tried for balance of power to keep peace among nations; now some statesmen have swung to the theory that monopolies of power may be solutions to world peace. ... It would certainly be a mighty advance if human beings could regard other human beings, not as pawns in a game, but as individuals with sacred rights to life and liberty."

Only democracy seems to offer this hope to mankind at large, the opportunity to regain their Christian concept of human dignity and worth. In this hope, Spellman proclaimed:

"America has been, and must ever continue to be, under God, the Beacon of Liberty . . . the proof that humanity can live in mutual respect based on the law of God, voiced through the conscience of man, and in mutual esteem, based on the responsibility of democratic life."

This is Spellman's--and his friend Pius XII's--fervent prayer:

Lord, lift this mighty host that is America;

Reconsecrate us in devotion to Thee ...

That righteousness again shall walk among the sons of men.

Rome and the U.S. The Church today must look to the U.S. for food to relieve the hunger and despair which, it well knows, drive angry men to claim their birthright as Cain claimed his. It looks to the U.S. as an example of the form of government which today promises the most for the Church's survival. It looks to the U.S. as an idealistic people who have at last chosen, or been forced, to take their place in international affairs. And it looks to Francis Cardinal Spellman as the practical, idealistic American who can best advise and guide its effort to utilize these forces in its favor.

-Leo XIII's encyclical, Rerum Novarum, 1891, is often cited now by U.S. labor leaders as part of labor's charter of rights. -Each cardinal is nominal pastor of one of Rome's 70 oldest churches, a tradition dating back to the early Church, in which the cardinals were simply the parish priests of Rome.

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