JFK and Catholicism: A (Re)Consideration

Last Friday, as the nation contemplated the 50^th anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, I sought a spot in the nation’s capital that I could reach easily before returning home from vacation. Arlington National Cemetery, with its eternal flame by his gravesite, was a bit too far and, in any case, likely to be thronged. The Kennedy Center for the Performing was also a bit too distant for my purposes. On the other hand, the Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle (my photograph of which accompanies this post), about 10 blocks from the bed and breakfast where I was staying, fit my requirements perfectly.

Most Americans who watched the coverage of the four awful days following JFK’s assassination remember what happened outside rather than inside: the final salute to the coffin of his father by John F. Kennedy Jr.

But that single touching moment on November 25, 1963 was just part of a day that furnished Americans—and particularly Catholics—with an opportunity to take stock of how the nation and one of its faith communities had evolved in the three years since Jack Kennedy had broken one of America’s unofficial but enduring barriers to the nation’s high office. Now the first Roman Catholic elected President was being buried, as a stunned, heartbroken America watched his Church lay him to rest in ancient pageantry that once might have struck most non-Catholics as unnerving but now seemed merely exotic. 

That spectacle at St. Matthew’s was part of a funeral conducted in Latin, a language that fell into increasing disuse within a few years when the Vatican permitted the Mass to be celebrated in the vernacular. Last week, I could not be around for the Mass of Remembrance held late that afternoon, but the largely empty confines of the vast church that morning gave me the opportunity to take in the atmosphere of one of the most powerfully symbolic settings on that somber Monday a half century ago. I slowly read and absorbed the marble plaque inlaid in front of the gates of the sanctuary that described the final journey of this most restless of politicians: “Here rested the remains of President Kennedy at the Requiem Mass, Nov. 25, 1963, before their removal to Arlington, where they lie in expectation of a heavenly resurrection.”

Those watching the solemn ceremonies  became aware that Matthew—a tax collector at the time he took up Jesus’ invitation to follow him—was the patron saint of civil servants. But the Gospel writer shared not only public service and an inclination for writing with the President, but, many believed, a common fate: martyrdom. Even a eulogy given the day after the assassination by Chief Justice Earl Warren, a non-Catholic, partook of this spirit, referring to the “martyrdom” of this “apostle of peace.”

It is difficult to imagine such terms used today. The debunking machinery has slipped into full gear over the last half century, seriously battering the reputations of both Kennedy and his Church. Both the man and the institution have been damaged by allegations of sexual transgression (though extramarital relationships with adult women are not to be compared with the rape of children).

None of this is to say, however, that examining Kennedy and Catholicism holds no value. Without discounting the importance of Kennedy’s death, it is more crucial that we understand the significance of his life. And discovering that necessarily originates with what he believed, a critical source of his actions: Catholicism.

The Kennedy funeral took place at a unique moment in American Catholicism. Urban political machines and the labor movement, both largely powered by blue-collar ethnic Catholics, not only provided one of the most dependable blocs in the Democratic Party, but had made sharp inroads into the American political establishment: as U.S. Attorney General (Bobby Kennedy), Speaker of the House (John McCormack), Senate Majority Leader (Mike Mansfield), and an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court (William Brennan).

Despite breaking the back of one of the most deeply ingrained prejudices in American politics, JFK was probably the least given among his siblings to religious piety. Bobby, for one, would step over the communion rail as an adult if an altar boy was missing and lend a priest a hand, and Rose Kennedy even thought, in a wrongheaded guess, that Ted might have a vocation for the priesthood. The oldest brother, Joe Jr., the one originally marked out for politics by their father, possessed an instinctive piety that, combined with his feisty instincts, might have proved disastrous on the campaign trail with non-Catholics.

In contrast, Jack was irreverent about nearly everything. That instinct helped immensely in the White House, when his skepticism about General Curtis LeMay’s belief in nuclear survivability kept the world away from disaster in the Cuban Missile Crisis. It would have been a surprise if it did not carry over to organized religion.

As an adolescent, his pointed questioning about the number of followers of Christ and Mohammed (“Why do you think we should believe in Christ any more than Mohammed?”) led a cleric to advise his parents to secure him religious instruction as soon as possible lest he become an atheist.

Had Kennedy’s adolescence occurred in the Seventies rather than the Thirties, he might well have become a lapsed Catholic, perhaps without ties to any organized religion. But he was a child of not only the extremely devout Rose but of a larger culture in which lack of religion was viewed even more suspiciously than having an inappropriate one, and so he remained a practicing Catholic. Privately, among closest aides such as Dave Powers and Kenneth O'Donnell, he would pray daily, and especially fervently in times of crisis, such as the death of his newborn son Patrick in August 1963. But he remained distinctly uncomfortable about overt public professions of Catholicism.

JFK’s attitude toward his ancestral faith, then, was private and emotive rather than public and intellectual. Indeed, according to speechwriter/biographer/hagiographer Theodore Sorensen, his boss “cared not a whit for theology.” He found more congenial the worldview of Richard Cardinal Cushing, who, in his long tenure at the helm of the Archdiocese of Boston, stuck to his vow of avoiding "all arguments with our non-Catholic neighbors and from all purely defensive talk about Catholicism." 

What especially interested JFK were the political stances of the Church hierarchy. Another aide/biographer, historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., wrote that he “discussed the princes of the Catholic Church with the same irreverent candor with which he discussed the bosses of the Democratic Party.”

His rapier wit hinted strongly at that “irreverent candor” such as when, as an adult running for office, he needled an overweight monsignor by saying it was an inspiration “to be here with…one of those lean ascetic clerics who show the effects of constant fast and prayer, and bring the message to us in the flesh.” The hierarchy of his day sometimes left him precious little room to maneuver. He was forced to withdraw, for instance, for an invitation to speak at a dinner of the ecumenical Chapel of Four Chaplains in Philadelphia when the city’s archdiocese opposed the project because canon law forbade the location of the memorial chapel in a Protestant church. (It undoubtedly rankled the naval vet Kennedy that the archdiocese was not participating in a project honoring participants in one of the most famous incidents of WWII: the torpedoing of the American troop ship Dorchester with a Catholic priest, a Jewish rabbi, and two Protestant ministers aboard.)

The Kennedy family’s close association with Cardinal Cushing has obscured, in the public eye, that during the 1960 election, this trailblazing Catholic politician did not enjoy the support of most archbishops in his church. It was not simply a matter of that hierarchy maintaining strict neutrality; more often, they followed the example of the conservative Francis Cardinal Spellman of New York, who found Richard Nixon more inclined toward the church’s stances on such matters as aid to parochial schools, a U.S. ambassador to the Vatican, fierce anti-Communism, and against birth control, according to Thomas Maier’s The Kennedys: America’s Emerald Kings. Eventually, the Kennedy campaign translated the attitude of Church personnel into the axiom that, while archbishops opposed them, nuns supported them.

Over a half century later, in the 2012 GOP primaries, Rick Santorum stirred considerable controversy with his statement that JFK’s famous Kennedy's September 12, 1960 speech to a group of southern Baptist ministers in Houston made him “want to throw up.” The line that the former U.S. Senator from Pennsylvania found offensive: "I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute."

The problem was not simply that Santorum had seriously misinterpreted JFK’s views on the proper place of spirituality-informed expression in the public square, but that he had little appreciation for how much electoral space to maneuver the Democrat required to ease the trepidation of many non-Catholics. (For a fine recap of where and how often Santorum went wrong, see this assessment by John Fea on the Web site Patheos.)

It was not only conservative Protestants who regarded any Catholic as something akin to the anti-Christ, but also those on the liberal/left end of the political spectrum who saw the religion as a medieval institution inimical to American notions of freedom of conscience. Many in the latter camp regarded Kennedy with suspicion, preferring the twice-rejected Adlai Stevenson.  

At its most benign, this concern took the form of renowned theologian Reinhold Niebuhr sharply questioning Kennedy’s possible stance toward pressure from the Church hierarchy before coming away satisfied. But at a more extreme level, it involved poet Archibald MacLeish disseminating notions of Irish Catholic backing of censorship and submission to clerical authority.

These fears found root in an environment in the decade leading up to the election in which birth-control advocate Margaret Sanger announced that she was considering leaving the U.S. if the Catholic Kennedy were elected President; in which blacklisted screenwriter Ring Lardner Jr. could write the anti-Catholic satire The Ecstasy of Owen Muir; and in which Paul Blanshard, an associate editor of The Nation, could produce the bestselling Book of the Month selection, American Freedom and Catholic Power, whose attitude is probably best encapsulated in this sentence: “The Catholic problem is still with us."

Under the circumstances, it was a practical necessity not only that Kennedy be seen as wearing his religion lightly, but also that, once elected, he stuck to his stances against parochial-school aid and naming an ambassador to Rome. Columnist Murray Kempton could not resist noting the irony: “We have again been cheated of the prospect of a Catholic president.”

The Catholic electoral monolith dreaded by so many across the political spectrum in 1960 has crumbled, if it can be said ever to have existed at all. In 2004, another U.S. Senator from Massachusetts with the initials JFK lost the Presidential vote of his Catholic co-religionists, 52 to 47 percent, to the evangelical Protestant George W. Bush. Kennedy had helped move the needle so that John Forbes Kerry could be judged more on his personality or his stances on issues rather than strictly his faith. Just as important, Kennedy had made it possible, nearly a half century after his election, for another person even further outside the WASP political mainstream, Barack Obama, to be elected President.

For different reasons, I found two of the most poignant reactions to the death of Kennedys coming from those of Irish descent. One was from Cardinal Cushing, who, after reciting the Latin phrases of the Requiem Mass, departed from the prepared text to cry out, on behalf of the young politico he had come to cherish: “May the angels, dear Jack, lead you into paradise. May the martyrs receive you at your coming.”

The other was the Irish short-story master Frank O’Connor, who wrote in Dublin’s Sunday Independent, two days after the assassination: “John Fitzgerald Kennedy was a miracle. In three different ways he broke through age-old American prejudices against Catholics, against Irishmen and against intellectuals, and you have to have lived in America to realize how strong those prejudices are.”

With time, as with much else about John F. Kennedy, the latter assessment would have to be qualified. (While a ferociously bookish young man who often used his reading to guide his political thought, JFK could only direct research efforts put out under his own name, not write those books himself, as shown by extensive studies in the latest 40 years demonstrating that the authorship of While England Slept and Profiles in Courage rightly belonged to others, not himself.) But, in the main, it remains valid. Religious bigotry, including the anti-Catholic variety, has hardly ended in the United States, but it was decisively checked by his election and Presidency.

This Day in Religious History (Fulton Sheen Receives Holy Orders)

September 20, 1919—A 24-year-old seminarian who was once told by his college debating coach that he was “absolutely the worst speaker I ever heard” was ordained a Roman Catholic priest in the Diocese of Peoria, a role that called for sermons. Little did Fulton J. Sheen imagine that he would become, in the words of the Rev. Billy Graham (who would know about such things), “one of the greatest preachers of our century.”

I’m still not sure of the exact process by which Archbishop Sheen acquired the extraordinary oratorical skills that made him the most effective preacher of the radio and network television eras. But reading the story of the above tough-love assessment given to the future televangelist before a crucial debate with the University of Notre Dame has convinced me that training and motivation can lead to at least incremental improvements—and perhaps more—in the speaking styles of many priests.

Sheen’s turnaround out has given me hope, after years of sitting in my pew on any given Sunday, believing that the ability to preach can’t be solely a gift from God.

In 1948, my Uncle Pete, like millions of other Americans, bought a TV so he could catch on a regular basis Milton Berle. Anyone challenging the slapstick comedian’s supremacy at 8 o’clock on Tuesday evenings was, it was understood, entering “the obituary slot.”

But four years after he started, the Dumont Television Network, in a bit of shrewd counterprogramming, chose to enter the lists against Berle. Before long, people like my grandaunt Hannah and her husband Jack would be watching Life Is Worth Living religiously, helping the prelate to clobber “Uncle Miltie” in the ratings.

(Berle came up with a good one-liner to account for his fall in the ratings: "He stayed on longer than I did because, let's face it, he had better writers. Mark, Luke...").

All these years after his greatest success, you can still catch Sheen, this time on the Catholic cable network Eternal Word Television Network (EWTN)—and, I’m sure, many viewers have. On the occasions that I’ve done so, while channel-surfing, I’ve been struck, as so many were at the time, by the man’s sheer theatricality—those piercing eyes, those flamboyant scarlet robes, those outstretched arms at the end of the show as he called out, “Bye now, and God love you!”

His props—including that omnipresent blackboard and that four-foot statue of Madonna and Child on a pedestal —were minimal, and I have a feeling that, if the prelate were alive today, he would scorn Powerpoint as a puny accompaniment to his real assets—including that voice.

In his history Catholics and American Culture, Fordham University historian Mark Massa, S.J., has noted that many Protestants—and even some Catholics—wondered at the time of Sheen’s peak in popularity if he might be simplifying theology a little too much.

I’m afraid that Sheen’s own character and legacy have been simplified in the nearly three decades since his death, often to his detriment, by supporters and detractors alike. He never sounded an uncertain trumpet against secularism or Communism, but he was also not an strict ideological captive of the right wing.

Even his penchant for simplification, so much the bane of intellectuals, appears eminently defensible when placed in religious and historical contexts. Christ, for instance, spoke in parables, allowing his complicated understanding of Talmudic texts to emerge in concrete tales understandable to the agricultural society of his time. In A Knock at Midnight, another immensely gifted 20th-century preacher, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., summarized years of study on the dignity and value of labor with a simple anecdote about a cleaning woman.

Here are some points to ponder about the host of Life Is Worth Living:

* Sheen was viscerally anti-Communist, but that did not necessarily make him a boon companion to the Republican Party. The archbishop was friendly with J. Edgar Hoover, but at the time the FBI director was seen as almost beyond party, since he had been retained in office by Democrats as well as Republicans. (Hoover was also not publicly known for the abuses of his office that would damage his legacy during the civil-rights era of the 1960s, or especially after his death in 1972.) More to the point, though Sheen appeared before the American Legion to denounce Communism, he did not associate himself with Senator Joseph McCarthy, as several other American bishops did at the time.

* Sheen made an enemy of original benefactor Francis Cardinal Spellman. In my book, anyone who ended up on the wrong side of Spellman couldn’t be all bad. Though Spellman had pushed Sheen’s appointment as director of the American branch of the Society for the Propagation of the Faith, the Church's principal source of missionary funds, the two soon quarreled. Sheen was so persuasive an advocate for his own cause that, even at the height of Spellman’s influence with the Vatican, the broadcasting priest was able to convince the pope to side with him rather than the cardinal. For this defiance, Spellman succeeded in exiling Sheen to Rochester, where the bishop’s tenure ended unhappily because of lack of organizational skill and his alienation of a significant component of the diocese by fully implementing the reforms of Vatican II.

* Sheen enjoyed friendly relations with members of other faiths. Like another Spellman church enemy, Boston’s Richard Cardinal Cushing, Sheen stayed on good terms with non-Catholics. For instance, he supported the creation of the state of Israel and assailed anti-Semitism in no uncertain terms during World War II (“For a Catholic to be anti-Semitic is to be un-Catholic.”)

* Sheen was unafraid to tell the truth, whether people liked to hear it or not. It should have made many Americans think twice about this nation’s involvement in Southeast Asia when Sheen—whose sermon on “The Death of Stalin” gained unexpected relevance when the Soviet dictator had a stroke and died within the fortnight after it was delivered in 1953—came out against the Vietnam War. He repeatedly criticized Kodak, the largest employer in Rochester, when it would have been safer to speak out once or, better yet for himself, not at all.

Sheen was not without flaws, to be sure. Biographer Thomas C. Reeves has listed a few of these, including inordinate vanity and gilding of an already impressive resume (i.e., adding a second doctorate to the one he already had). He might also have tried to ferret out harder the insights of psychology rather than attack Freud for the religious skepticism evidenced in works such as Civilization and Its Discontents.

But revelations in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall have shown just how correct Sheen was in blasting Communism as “the final logic of the dehumanization of man.” Bringing the word of God to millions—and easing the assimilation of Catholics into the American mainstream by conveying a sense of optimism, self-confidence and intellect—are also significant contributions to the Church in the wider national culture.

Only a couple of months before he died in 1979, Sheen was embraced at St. Patrick’s Cathedral by another master communicator and evangelist to millions, Pope John Paul II. In one of the great ironies of histories, the cause for Sheen’s canonization was initiated by John Cardinal O’Connor, a successor to the office of Archbishop of New York that had once been held by the televangelist’s church enemy Spellman.

This Day in Religious History (Eleanor Roosevelt Column Sparks Feud With Cardinal Spellman)

June 23, 1949—Seldom if ever did Eleanor Roosevelt and Francis Cardinal Spellman shrink from controversy, but the one that began in earnest on this day with publication of her “My Day” newspaper column concerning his proposal for parochial school aid became particularly charged, with the New York Archbishop eventually claiming that the former First Lady had demonstrated anti-Catholic bigotry “unworthy of an American mother."

It took an entire summer for the feud to subside, by which time Spellman had instructed clergy in the archdiocese to denounce Mrs. Roosevelt from the pulpit, she had urged President Harry S. Truman to withdraw her nomination as a delegate to the U.N. General Assembly because of Spellman’s “strange campaign,” and the Vatican itself decided to rein in the outspoken conservative prelate.

It all was finally resolved the way heated diplomatic disputes usually are: through the intercession of a trusted intermediary (in this case, New York boss Edward J. Flynn), with the help of written statements that do nothing to paper over real differences and insincere smiles by both sides at an afternoon tea.

“First Citizen of the World” Vs. “The American Pope”

In the court of posterity, for far more numerous reasons than Spellman’s hysterical response above, the verdict has gone overwhelmingly to the woman Harry Truman called “the first citizen of the world” rather than the portly prelate often seen as, to use the title of a biographer, the “American Pope.”

It’s hard not to sympathize with a woman who stood up for the rights of Jews and African-Americans when they needed champions the most; who served as a trailblazer for women in politics; who suffered as a young orphan, a homely young mother, a belittled daughter-in-law, and betrayed wife; who always visited union workers and soldiers, making them feel that their cause was hers, too.

And it’s downright impossible to like a prince of the church who always told those in the pews which films were pornographic, denouncing all sorts of sexual sins, while at least somewhat credibly charged with being a closeted homosexual; who probably knew more about Manhattan real estate than he did about the Vulgate; and who lorded it over dissenting pastors and archdiocesan cemetery workers who only wanted to form a union so they could earn what Pope Leo XIII had said they were entitled to, like all workingmen: a living wage.

Case closed. Court adjourned.

Wait a second…

Controversies don’t begin and end as debates where points are neatly made and tallied. They spring from one’s personal interactions as an adult, one’s education, one’s childhood experiences, even the unchallenged, instinctive presumptions of those in your circle dating back generations.

If only the Roosevelt-Spellman donnybrook merely rested on a reading of the Constitution and First Amendment law! But it became so publicly turbulent because of long-simmering resentments on each side.

In short, though he acted in an uncivilized, even sometimes un-Christian manner that embarrassed his Church, Spellman had a point: Eleanor Roosevelt possessed considerable traces of an anti-Catholicism that she couldn’t fully hide and that many of her admirers would rather not acknowledge even existed.

She might not have been as reactionary as her opponent in this debate, but the fact that it erupted at all indicates that she was, in her way, equally tone-deaf to the concerns of the other side.

The Barden Education Bill

What set the two at loggerheads was a House bill by Graham A. Barden, a North Carolina Democrat, calling for funding for public schools. Spellman and the rest of the Catholic hierarchy took issue with the lack of provisions for parochial schools—a deficit that the New York archbishop ascribed to “a craven crusade of religious prejudice against Catholic schools.”

Let’s consider at the outset—how often were Congressman Barden and Mrs. Roosevelt on the same side?

Yes, he was a Democrat, but for most of the stands he took during his 13 terms on Capitol Hill—school segregation, the Taft-Hartley Act, and even other education bills (seven years later, he would kill a school construction measure)—his views strongly diverged from hers. 

At his death in 1967, Time Magazine called him a “dedicated obstructionist.” Offhand, I can’t think of another instance in which Mrs. Roosevelt agreed with him on anything—which makes it all the more striking that they did on this point.

Mrs. Roosevelt could see none of Cardinal Spellman’s concerns, and he made an ideal foil for her. 

Just as Senator Joseph McCarthy made anti-anti-communism respectable through his baseless charges, Spellman’s vitriolic, ad hominem outbursts made anti-Catholicism respectable. The process was the same: the object of denunciation instantly became “innocent by association.”

Thus, legitimate concerns about the guilt of Alger Hiss and Julius Rosenberg could be dismissed out of hand because McCarthy had accused so many others with no foundation whatsoever, and Spellman’s targets instantly won sympathy because he was always going off on someone or other.

Believers in Mrs. Roosevelt, very much including her protégé and eventual biographer, Joseph P. Lash, certainly took her side in this, seeing no grounds for his annoyance.

I think they’re missing something. Did Mrs. Roosevelt call the cardinal a “papist,” or any other loaded ethnic term? No. On the other hand, her comments were pointed, personalizing the issue more than it had to be.

Consider that the very first sentence of her column spoke of “the controversy brought about by the request made by Cardinal Spellman.” That wasn’t likely to improve his digestion as he ate his cereal.

Franklin Roosevelt, one strongly suspects, would have approached things differently. Not that he didn’t share her general worldview.

From his first days as an Albany legislator, when he became the focal point of the Democrats' anti-Tammany "reform" wing, down to the 1940 campaign, when his maneuverings for a precedent-shattering third term inevitably denied the Presidency to longtime advisor Jim Farley, FDR's dealings with Irish party leaders carried "an air of jaunty patronization," writes biographer Geoffrey C. Ward.

“Catholics and Jews Are Here Under Sufferance”

The Roosevelts’ attitudes toward Irish Catholics – and, indeed, non-Protestants in general – are best seen in a conversation involving Leo T. Crowley, a Catholic economist just appointed to a government post, and FDR’s Treasury Secretary, Henry Morgenthau Jr., who was Jewish.

Morgenthau recounted FDR’s comments in his diary: “Leo, you know this is a Protestant country, and the Catholics and Jews are here under sufferance. It is up to you to go along with anything that I want.”

The tone here – of a lord of the manor, addressing his inferiors – is as unmistakable as it is ugly.

Yet Catholics, and especially those of Irish ancestry, reaped the rewards of Franklin Roosevelt’s ascension to the Presidency. 

Recognizing their importance in his coalition, FDR appointed Irish Catholics in unprecedented numbers throughout his administration – not only in his Cabinet (Postmaster-General Jim Farley and Frank Murphy) but among his closest advisers (Bronx boss and Democratic national chairman Flynn, personal secretary Grace Tully and White House aide Thomas “Tommy the Cork” Corcoran).

Like the rest of American society, Irish Catholics benefited from the relief and massive jobs programs generated by the New Deal, and they responded with unswerving loyalty and votes for Roosevelt.

Ward's judgment of why FDR softened his attitudes towards Irish Americans is judicious but pointed:

"Franklin would learn tolerance as he went along, dictated by the realities of power; he would finally prove shrewd enough never to allow his private prejudice to deny him access to any individual who might be useful to him."

Many Irish-Americans strongly—and probably correctly—suspected Spellman of harboring GOP sympathies. 

Yet FDR, no matter what he might have privately thought, would have cleared a place for the cleric on his schedule, where the cardinal would be humored, regaled, massaged until he fairly purred.

The Roots of Mrs. Roosevelt’s Anti-Catholicism

That wasn’t Eleanor’s style. She didn’t have to work with or through the cardinal. 

Following her husband’s example, she made one of her first significant appearances on the public stage by battling Tammany Hall boss Charles F. Murphy – in this case, over his insistence on appointing two female delegates to the 1924 Democratic Convention.

During her husband’s administration and after, she did not endear herself to many other Catholics by supporting birth control and the Loyalist (anti-clerical) government in the Spanish Civil War. 

True, like FDR, she employed Irish Catholics as close aides.

But the whiff of ethnic condescension is as unmistakable as affection in her description of New York Senator Thomas Grady: "He was a very charming Irishman, in spite of the fact that he liked his Irish liquor somewhat too well." 

(She should have been more careful about talking about ascribing ethnicity to liquor: her own father was an alcoholic.)

Even as devoted an admirer of Mrs. Roosevelt as Lash acknowledged, “Somewhere deep in her subconscious was an anti-Catholicism which was a part of her Protestant heritage.” He traced this to her great-grandmother Ludlow’s Sunday school exercise books, which inveighed against “popery.”

Mrs. Roosevelt’s son Elliott was considerably more emphatic about the sources of her prejudices in the memoir he co-authored with James Brough, Mother R: Eleanor Roosevelt’s Untold Story.

He relates in detail how, from childhood on, she associated Catholicism with Tammany Hall corruption; how she felt that Catholics owed more loyalty to their faith than their country; how she supported (as she claimed correctly in her rejoinder to Spellman) Al Smith as President, but only for as long as he proved useful in getting her polio-stricken husband back into the political arena; and how, on her most vulnerable point, she remembered her husband's affair with Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd, a Catholic.

Unlike her statements on African-Americans and Jews, where she frequently, generously—and accurately—alluded to their struggle for acceptance and rights, you would have to search high and low to find a similar comment on behalf of Catholics.

Missing throughout her columns on the controversy is any admission of the existence of the Know-Nothings, the 19th-century burning of convents, the existence of the Ku Klux Klan’s anti-Catholic activism, of “No Irish Need Apply” signs. 

(She denounced the Klan’s activities against Al Smith, but this was at a time when supporting the Democratic Presidential nominee—and the most popular party politician in New York—would prove extremely helpful to her husband.)

Paul Blanshard, an editor at The Nation and son of three generations of Protestant ministers, provided intellectual ballast for Mrs. Roosevelt’s opposition to the bill with his increasingly strident denunciations of the Church. American Freedom and Catholic Power, a bestseller in 1949 and 1950, likened the Church to the Soviet Union as an anti-democratic institution.

On one point, Mrs. Roosevelt’s attempt to sound conciliatory revealed a lack of understanding of American acculturation that had already taken place: 

“It is quite possible,” she wrote, that religious schools “may make a great contribution to the public school systems, both on the lower levels and on the higher levels.”

As a matter of fact, they already had. The presence of Catholic schools not only helped public schools avoid overcrowding, but these institutions, as Jay P. Dolan noted in The American Catholic Experience, acted as agents of Americanization for generations of successive immigrants.

On another point, Mrs. Roosevelt transformed a complicated history into a simple black-and-white one. To change “the original traditions of our nation” concerning separation of church and state, she wrote, would be “harmful…to our whole attitude of tolerance in the religious area.”

She did not note that in large parts of the nation—including New England—Protestant schools were funded until well into the 19th century, when Catholic schools’ request for similar treatment led to a convenient reconsideration of the whole concept of separation of church and state.

The Roosevelt-Spellman imbroglio had a ripple effect a decade later, when Mrs. Roosevelt saw John F. Kennedy’s Catholicism as a barrier to his ability to win the election, as well as her own endorsement of him as the Democratic standard-bearer. It has also served as a kind of prototype of subsequent troubled church-state relations.

Like Spellman, today’s Catholic archbishops have, all too often, moved with precious little political dexterity. 

At the same time, many historians and commentators have, like Mrs. Roosevelt, been unable to view the vast array of church-state issues with anything other than an often simplified view of an American tableau with as much turbulence as glory. 

The public suffers the most from this gulf of mutual incomprehension.