Common Ground

by J. Anthony Lukas

  Medeiros’ fears were not unfounded. When his appointment was announced, the city’s Irish Catholics were stunned. For 124 years, the bishops of Boston had been men of Irish descent, and since the turn of the century, the hierarchy—from chancellor down through the lowliest parish priest—had been overwhelmingly Irish. Even the Italians, ever more numerous in the diocese, found it difficult to rise in Boston’s Church. Now the faithful were being asked to accept as their new bishop not only a non-Irishman, but a Portuguese, one of the olive-skinned immigrants they had long regarded as third-class Catholics.

  Shock waves from his appointment were felt first in rectories and convents throughout the diocese, where much of the Irish clergy saw it as a threat to their historic prerogatives. Though some of the younger priests welcomed the appointment of an outsider as a breath of fresh air, others expressed their dismay in unmistakable terms. In some rectories, the priests revived a ditty composed years before in a different context:

  Hail Mary, full of grace,

  The Irish are in second place.

  The clergy’s astonishment was echoed by their congregations. Grumbling could be heard, particularly in the city’s working-class districts, about “that little Portogee” or the “spic Archbishop.” And a few—a tiny handful, undoubtedly—took more direct action. In the weeks before he was to arrive, the Boston Chancery received several anonymous phone calls threatening Medeiros’ life or Church property. On October 6, hours after he landed in Boston to take up his new responsibilities, a cross was burned on the Chancery lawn. The next evening, following his installation, intruders ransacked Newman House, the Catholic student center at Boston University, and shortly before midnight, a fire—clearly the work of arsonists—severely damaged the Archdiocesan Television Center and adjacent St. Jerome’s Chapel. Later, a pipe bomb was discovered in the Chancery doorway. After the bomb squad disarmed it, police protection was redoubled there and around the Archbishop’s residence.

  These were disconcerting portents for Medeiros’ tenure in Boston. But they were only one aspect of his reception, which was generally courteous, even enthusiastic. After 350 persons—among them Governor Sargent and Mayor White—greeted him at Logan Airport, state police escorted his motorcade to Cushing’s residence, where he met privately with the desperately ill seventy-five-year-old Cardinal. Then the press was ushered into the room and Cushing spoke warmly of Medeiros: “He is a fine man, one of the finest members of the whole American hierarchy. I welcome him to the Archdiocese of Boston.” Acknowledging the contrast in their temperaments—“we are two different types of men”—he put the most favorable construction on it: “He represents the higher type of man and he will lead our people closer to the Divine Master.” Near tears, the Cardinal broke off and gazed sadly down at the floor. There was a long, awkward pause until someone asked Medeiros how it felt to be Cushing’s successor.

  “I will answer that,” Medeiros replied, “by asking Cardinal Cushing for his blessing.” He knelt on the floor before the Cardinal, who, rising unsteadily to his feet, intoned the ancient blessing of the Church in a half-audible whisper. Medeiros kissed Cushing’s ring, and the old Cardinal, obviously moved, embraced him.

  The next afternoon, after Boston’s new Archbishop had been installed in solemn rites at the Cathedral of the Holy Cross, he spoke to the crowd of 2,500 faithful in humble tones which contrasted sharply with the splendor of the occasion. “I do not know how to serve you as your bishop, your shepherd, your father and your brother, with any show of oratory or philosophy,” he said. “I cannot rely on any power of my own. Personally I feel too weak and too small for the task entrusted to me by the Holy Father. But I believe I can do all things in Him who is our strength and with your indispensable and loving cooperation.”

  Whatever he said that day would have been lost in a more powerful drama. Cushing was so consumed by cancer that few of his advisers had expected him to appear at the Cathedral, but he summoned his waning energies and hobbled painfully at the rear of the great procession, taking his place in the sanctuary, where he sat erect but haggard through the long ceremony. Finally a microphone was set before him, and the bishop who had presided over the Archdiocese for twenty-six years said goodbye in a voice drained of its once robust timbre. “Today we welcome—and warmly welcome—a new Archbishop. He is in the prime of his life, rich in character and ability, and full of promise for the years ahead…. I can assure our new bishop that nowhere in God’s good world will he find more earnest collaborators, more willing hands and hearts to assist him, more fervent prayers in support of all his endeavors.”

  Then, his voice trembling with emotion, he bid farewell: “Whatever time is left for me, whatever pain or suffering, I offer joyfully for the Church that I have loved and tried to serve for three quarters of a century. Pray for me, as I pray for you—and God bless you all.” At that, the vast throng surged to its feet and—with the new Archbishop now a neglected spectator—gave the aged Cardinal a five-minute ovation.

  Even after the crozier of authority had changed hands, Medeiros was eclipsed by his predecessor. For three weeks the two bishops shared the episcopal residence on Commonwealth Avenue, Medeiros an uneasy guest in his own house, until Cushing drew his last breath on November 2. His passing provoked a massive outpouring of sorrow and affection. In four days of official mourning, more than half a million people filed past the burgundy-draped catafalque. Thousands more surrounded the Cathedral, standing ten deep along Washington Street, as eleven Cardinals and fifty bishops led the funeral procession. And once they had bid farewell to “this valiant newsmaker, this holy man, this zealous priest, this uncommon prelate,” the Cardinal’s broad-brimmed scarlet hat was hoisted high above the altar, where it hung beside Cardinal O’Connell’s, there to cast its potent shadow on his successor for years to come.

  If Humberto Medeiros was an alien graft on the sturdy frame of Boston’s Irish Catholicism, so the first Massachusetts Catholics were loathsome eruptions in the Puritan body politic. To the “visible saints” who founded their communal life in compact with a fierce Protestant God, Roman Catholicism was the doctrine of the Antichrist, reeking with superstition, idolatry, and despotism. At first, this horror was largely visceral; straying into a Catholic service, John Adams found it “most awful and affecting; the poor wretches, fingering their beads, chanting Latin, not a word of which they understood; their Pater Nosters and Ave Marias; their holy water; their crossing themselves perpetually; their bowing and kneeling and genuflecting.” This revulsion was reinforced by more palpable fears of French-Canadian Catholics, “who by their subtle insinuations industriously labor to debauch, seduce and withdraw the Indians from their due obedience unto his Majesty.” For years, Guy Fawkes Day—the anniversary of a Catholic plot to blow up the Houses of Parliament—was celebrated in Boston as Pope Day, with rival gangs from the North End and the South End, each carrying horrible effigies of the Pope and the devil, doing battle on the Common. Revolutionary pamphleteers exploited Boston’s anti-Catholicism by equating British tyranny with popery. Only gratitude for France’s assistance in the Revolution, and the need to neutralize Catholic Quebec, led Massachusetts to pass a statute of toleration in 1780.

  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 conside
red 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.