The Master Builder

Short and amiably unprepossessing, the man who sat in the great episcopal throne of St. Patrick's Cathedral in 1939 was hardly the image of a bishop, let alone the archbishop of the vast Archdiocese of New York. "I shall pray as if everything depended upon God," he said when he assumed his office. "I shall work as if everything depended on me." And so seriously did he take his vow -- so firmly did he place his mark on American Catholicism -- that when he died of a stroke in Manhattan last week, Francis Cardinal Spellman, 78, was without question the most influential cleric in the U.S.

Born in Whitman, Mass., where his father ran a grocery, Spellman gave no early hint of religious vocation. He attended public elementary and high schools, helped in his father's store, worked one summer as a conductor on the local trolley line. At New York's Jesuit-run Fordham University he was a conscientious but hardly brilliant student, a debater, and an earnest poet. Only on the eve of graduation did he decide to enter the priesthood. Ordained in 1916, he went to Rome as translator for a Boston bishop in 1925, so impressing Pope Pius XI that he was recruited to the staff of the Papal Secretariate of State, the first American priest to serve in that office.

The Second Voice. With a knack for administration that was to serve him so well in New York, the young priest brought American publicity techniques to the Vatican, introducing such novelties as the mimeographed handout and the background news conference. The first voice heard on Vatican Radio in 1931 was the Pope's; the second was Spellman's.

The most significant aspect of his seven years in the Vatican was his friendship with Eugenio Cardinal Pacelli, later Pope Pius XII. No two men could have presented a greater contrast. Thin to the point of ascetism, Pacelli towered over Spellman, whose round, beaming face invariably drew the adjective "cherubic." Yet when the chubby Yankee Irishman was consecrated a bishop in St. Peter's in 1932, he wore the same vestments that the patrician Roman had worn at his own consecration. Returning to the U.S., Spellman served as auxiliary bishop of Boston and two months after the elevation of Pius XII in 1939 was named Archbishop of New York (he was made a cardinal in 1946).

The New York hierarchy was stunned by the choice of a little-known outsider; Boston's William Cardinal O'Connell, who had never much appreciated his rising young assistant, was simply chagrined. "Francis," he said, "epitomizes what happens to a bookkeeper when you teach him how to read." The comment was neither charitable nor accurate, but it did contain at least one grain of truth. In 28 years, Spellman put up the greatest mass of ecclesiastical building in history--well over $500 million for schools, churches and other institutions--earning for himself an unquestioned reputation as the church's master builder.

Christmas with the Troops. Militantly antiCommunist, he thundered against concessions to the Communist countries, urging a role for the U.S. in Viet Nam as far back as the mid-'50s. Indeed, his call last year for nothing less than an Allied victory in Viet Nam brought him under attack by opponents of the war. As Roman Catholic vicar of U.S. armed forces, he visited the battlefields in World War II, making it a habit--up through his trip to Viet Nam last year --to spend Christmas with American troops overseas.

In doctrine, the cardinal was a conservative, though he loyally implemented changes in the liturgy when they were approved by the Vatican Council. He denounced from the pulpit movies that he considered immoral, opposed public aid for birth control as strenuously as he promoted public aid for parochial schools. In a famous instance in 1949, he accused Eleanor Roosevelt of "discrimination unworthy of an American mother" for her opposition to state aid to Catholic schools.

The Man on the Dais. Though Spellman never openly favored a political candidate, he was a powerful influence in New York and sometimes in the nation. He frequently made known his preference for a candidate by the choice of main speaker at his annual Al Smith Memorial Dinner. In 1948 the man on the dais was Thomas Dewey; in 1952 he was Dwight D. Eisenhower. In 1960 John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon shared the honors, evidence of the cardinal's neutrality. As a subtle behind-the-scenes mover, Spellman was the equal of any of his guests, and--if he had not donned the clerical collar--might very well have been the featured speaker himself.

Spellman lost a measure of power with the death of Pius XII, and his conservative theology and sometimes rigid ways set him apart somewhat from the new church. Yet he enjoyed his greatest triumph when he played host to Pope Paul VI in 1965--the first time that any Pope had set foot in the Western Hemisphere. The cardinal had grown feeble in recent years, but he kept up his round of appearances at dinners and parades. It was appropriate that just a few hours before he died he had stopped in at two dinners at the Waldorf-Astoria, including one to raise funds for Spanish Harlem.

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