by Thomas Maier
Parochial schools formed the heart of Boston’s archdiocese, a place where, as Kennedy wrote, thousands of Catholic immigrant families first learned the language and what it meant to be an American. During congressional debate over a 1950 federal aid-for-education bill, Kennedy not only supported assistance to public schools but also contended that parochial school students should be entitled to federal aid for bus transportation and health services. Kennedy worked with Spellman and other Catholic leaders to ensure a fair share of funds for Catholic schoolchildren. “The principles are still clear but, unhappily, the prejudices remain powerful,” observed the Boston Pilot, the archdiocese’s publication, in the midst of this effort.“Standing out as a white knight against the crepuscular haze, we are very proud to note, is our own Congressman John F.Kennedy.”Another Catholic publication, the Sign, noted that “Boston’s boyish congressman was in the thick of the adroit intra-committee maneuvering over the boiling hot federal aid to education issue.”This publication said “much credit is due” to Kennedy, a “Galahad in the House,” for helping to block one bill that would entirely prevent aid to Catholic schoolchildren, and another bill backed by President Truman that left the eligibility of Catholic schools for aid up to the states.
Ugly prejudices surfaced often on this issue, and at least once they angered Kennedy. At a 1947 House subcommittee hearing, Kennedy listened politely to the testimony of Elmer E. Rogers, assistant to the Sovereign Grand Commander of the Freemasons in the South, who suggested that Catholics were under orders from the Pope to undermine the traditional American divide between church and state. At one point, Rogers declared the church wanted “to destroy our liberties and further expand their theocracy as a world government.” He said that American Catholics felt a split allegiance to the Pope as well as to their country. When Rogers claimed Catholic parents would be excommunicated if their children didn’t go to parochial school, Kennedy challenged him.
“I never went to a parochial school,”Kennedy insisted, a statement based on the fact that Canterbury was run by Catholic laymen, not the local archdiocese or parish.“I am a Catholic and yet my parents were never debarred from the sacrament, so the statement is wrong.”
Rogers didn’t relent. “You are pretty prominent people up there in Massachusetts,” he replied. “I know something of the prominence of your father, and the bishops are pretty diplomatic and have good judgment about such things.”
The confrontation was extraordinary. Indeed, Kennedy’s father did wield a great deal of influence with the Catholic hierarchy, quite evident from the abundance of photos and news clippings showing him and his son awarding gifts and donations to church-run hospitals and orphanages. But the ugliness of Rogers’s comments seemed to startle. Jack knew of the Freemasons’ historic criticism of the Catholic Church, though never had he confronted it in such personal terms.
“The statement is wrong because you have a living example,” Kennedy stated. “I do not want to get in an argument about Catholic theology, but you do not want to make statements that are inaccurate. . . .Now you don’t mean the Catholics in America are legal subjects of the Pope? I am not a legal subject of the Pope.”
At a public hearing, Rogers, with his obvious hidebound rants, could be dismissed easily as a kook. Though clearly perturbed, Kennedy still kept his cool when confronted with such intolerant views. Yet in this exchange, what Kennedy found perhaps most disconcerting was the nagging suspicion that many other Americans harbored views similar to those Rogers had expressed, a none-too-subtle bigotry that marginalized Catholics, cast them as a subversive threat to American freedoms and, in effect, allotted them second-class status in society.
THESE FEARS about Catholic power extended beyond the reactionary realm of the Freemasons and included several prominent Protestant clergymen. In particular, G. Bromley Oxnam, a bishop of the Methodist Church and leader of Protestants and Other Americans United for the Separation of Church and State (POAU), complained loudly and bitterly about attempts by the Catholic hierarchy to gain a portion of federal monies for their students. “The Church not only wants public funds for private purposes,” Oxnam charged, “but must know that to drain off vast sums from public education is so to weaken it as eventually to destroy it.” In a letter to the New York Times, three other religious leaders complained about “the political activities of members of the Roman Catholic hierarchy who, as representatives of a foreign power, have been carrying on unceasing propaganda and utilizing continuous and insistent pressure on press and radio and state and federal officials to break down our United States constitutional guarantee of separation of church and state.”
The lightning rod for this criticism was Cardinal Spellman, the Machiavellian-like prelate who virtually glowed with resentment. His words echoed the rhetoric of his former boss, Cardinal O’Connell of Boston, who had once rallied his embattled flock with sermons about Brahmin oppression. “Once it was the tremendous influx of Catholic immigrants which stirred the attack on the Catholic Church,” fumed Spellman.“Now it is the growth and expansion of Catholic education which is claimed to be a constant threat to the supremacy of public education in the United States. Why is Catholic education thus attacked? Is it because in fact the public schools are Protestant schools, or at least schools which consciously or unconsciously are directed along Protestant lines? . . . Is it not clear that when a Catholic schoolchild is denied the use of a public school bus an injustice is done not to the Catholic child, but to an American child who happens to be a Catholic?”
MANY LIBERAL DEMOCRATS, a natural constituency for Jack Kennedy, expressed their own reservations about the church’s intent in seeking federal aid for its school children. The most notable critic was former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt. In her newspaper column called “My Day,” Mrs. Roosevelt inveighed against any federal aid for Catholic schools and poked the cardinal with a few thinly veiled jabs. (“Sometimes, I think church organizations are foolish because they do things that lead people to believe that they are not interested mainly in the spiritual side of the church, but that they have a decided interest also in temporal affairs,” she wrote.) Mrs. Roosevelt, though taking the high road, had a fondness for alluding to the church’s inquisitorial past in Europe. To prove she wasn’t a secularist, she even suggested that “it might be possible to devise a prayer that all the denominations could say” in public schools—exactly the kind of notion a religious minority would fear in a pluralistic society. Spellman reacted bitterly with a crude personal attack. “Whatever you may say in the future, your record of anti-Catholicism stands for all to see—a record which you yourself wrote on the pages of history which cannot be recalled—documents of discrimination unworthy of an American mother!” he charged in a letter released to the public.
Though Joe Kennedy probably agreed with Spellman’s position—both on federal aid and on the whiff of anti-Catholicism from the Roosevelts— his son avoided the open warfare exhibited by the cardinal with the former first lady, as did virtually every Catholic politician in the Democratic Party. Spellman’s attack on Mrs. Roosevelt drew criticism from many quarters of American life; it prompted even more anticlerical harangues from such groups as the POAU. Senator Kennedy consistently made it clear that he favored federal aid only for “auxiliary” educational services such as buses, not a wholesale subsidizing of religious schools—exactly what Spellman later enunciated in a “clarifying” letter forced upon him by the Vatican. But, despite the efforts of Jack Kennedy and others in Congress, the public uproar doomed a federal aid-for-education bill.
SENATOR KENNEDY’S reputation as an advocate of causes close to the heart of America’s Catholics, while winning praise back home, created unease among those who questioned his ability to distinguish between matters of church and state. The Kennedy family’s alliance with Spellman suggested that the young, ambitious politician came from a conservative sector of the church, intolerant of dissent and repressive by nature. They took note when Joe Kennedy quickly endorse
d Spellman’s move to censor the movie Baby Doll, even though he’d never seen it. Liberals wondered about Jack Kennedy’s opposition to any government assistance for birth control—and whether U.S. bishops had influenced his stand. Could Kennedy be trusted to keep black-robed clergy out of the inner sanctum of government?
Conversely, many Catholics wondered whether Senator Kennedy would have to make too many compromises, be forced to disavow his own Irish Catholic roots if he ran for higher office. In taking on this extraordinary challenge for a Catholic in America—given the still painful memory of Al Smith’s debacle thirty years earlier—Jack Kennedy’s own religious precepts would be questioned incessantly. Whether he liked it or not, he became the uber-Catholic, a focal point for a discussion about the role of church and state in America, about tolerance and the rise of immigrant minority populations, that went far beyond his own personal merits or beliefs. As history unfolded, Kennedy became not only a candidate for president but a de facto defender of his faith, a vessel of transforming hope and power for the immigrant experience—a kind of political Jackie Robinson for those Irish- American kids who dreamed of the White House. By inclination and design, Kennedy aimed to break the hold of white Anglo-Saxon Protestant men on the Oval Office by appearing as unthreatening and non-ethnic as possible—in short, just like a WASP. (Even his hair—once rough and tumbly like Bobby’s unruly locks—was now as smooth and neat as a corporation chief ’s approaching the summit of his career.) Both Kennedy and his father spent most of their public lives deliberately avoiding the traditional stereotype of the rowdy Irish pol, the roly-poly Big Daddy of big-city machine politics and patronage with the smell of alcohol on his breath. Ironically, press clips and television commentators now made Jack’s religion an identifying trait and repeatedly referred to him as “the Catholic running for president.”
There was something terribly amusing about his predicament. Among the Kennedys, Jack wasn’t perceived as particularly religious at all. Jack’s sister Eunice and brother Robert were considered far more devout. Jacqueline Kennedy believed it odd that her husband’s bid for the presidency would revolve so much around religion. “I think it’s so unfair of people to be against Jack because he is a Catholic,” Jackie quipped to a family friend at a Washington party. “He’s such a poor Catholic. Now, if it were Bobby, I could understand it: he never misses Mass and prays all the time.”
As a Catholic, Jack Kennedy was quite ordinary; and he kept his church practice deliberately out of the limelight, a prudent political judgment as the 1960 election neared. Unlike other Irish Catholic politicians, he didn’t routinely pose with nuns and priests, just as he didn’t like marching in St. Patrick’s Day parades. As a result, some historians dismissed Kennedy’s sense of religion altogether. But friends and relatives said Kennedy’s Catholicism contained more than that simple assessment. He celebrated Mass regularly, prayed faithfully and observed the sacraments. Although he remained imbued with the culture and traditions of the Catholic Church, he clearly enjoyed the modern world and its obsessions with sex, power and money. To many Americans, Jack Kennedy didn’t fit their own stereotype of how a Catholic should look and behave. But undeniably, Kennedy was a Catholic for all to see if they wanted.
Jack was a believer with a healthy dose of skepticism, recalled Lem Billings, whose numerous adventures with Jack ranged from their visit to a Harlem whorehouse to meeting the Pope. Though Jack surely didn’t fall prostrate at holy sites during a late 1930s European tour, he showed an avid interest in the culture and history of the church.“I think it was a bit difficult for Jack to buy a lot of the miracles which we were shown in Rome, for instance Veronica’s veil or the steps down which St. Peter’s head is supposed to have fallen. . . . He assured me that it wasn’t necessary to believe this in order to be a good Catholic,” said Billings.“I don’t think he was a dedicated Catholic like his mother and sisters, but he was a good Catholic. I cannot remember in my life when Jack Kennedy didn’t go to Church on Sunday. . . . I never, never, never remember in my life Jack’s missing his prayers at night on his knees. He always went to confession when he was supposed to.”
Though the world around him increasingly identified Kennedy as a Catholic, his aides detected only a slight undercurrent in his thoughts and actions. “John Kennedy was a faithful adherent but he did not talk about it,” recalled Sorensen, forty years later in an interview. In his book on the Kennedy years, Sorensen’s comment that JFK “cared not a whit for theology” has been repeatedly quoted by historians, though the rest of his explanation rarely follows.“He felt neither self-conscious nor superior about his religion but simply accepted it as part of his life,”Ted Sorensen added.“He resented the attempt of an earlier biographer to label him as ‘not deeply religious’; he faithfully attended Mass each Sunday, even in the midst of fatiguing out-of-state travels when no voter would know whether he attended services or not.” From a similar perspective,Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. observed:“Though Kennedy spent only one year of his life in a Catholic school, he assimilated a good deal of the structure of the faith, encouraged probably by his mother and sisters. He often adopted the Catholic side in historical controversy, as in the case of Mary, Queen of Scots; and he showed a certain weakness for Catholic words of art, like ‘prudence,’ and a certain aversion toward bad words for Catholics, like ‘liberal.’”
Decades later, his cousin Joseph Gargan recalled Jack Kennedy’s sense of religious identity as quite common for his time, what some today might call “traditional.” In his own way, Gargan echoed Schlesinger’s assessment: that Catholicism was engrained in Jack Kennedy’s soul, a cultural touchstone that could not be erased in prep school or at Harvard. Gargan seemed to acknowledge his cousin’s faults as well as his graces: “Jack Kennedy was a humble sort of fellow—he didn’t wear his religion on his sleeve. . . . I can remember going often with him to St. Francis Church. . . . He was very much aware of the rules of the Catholic Church. . . . But like all of us, he was a human being and all of us have failures, defects of character and frailties, and Jack Kennedy would be the first to admit he had many. But as far as the Catholic Church is concerned, Christ wouldn’t have had to die on the cross if we were all saints. Jack Kennedy would say simply,‘Join the club, we’re all sinners, we’re all in the same boat.’”
These testimonials hardly account for the paradoxes in John Kennedy’s character and the mystery of his beliefs, perhaps the most abstruse aspect of an individual’s life to document. Yet in this respect, Jack resembled so many young American Catholics returned home after World War II who remained loyal to the church but held misgivings about its teachings, including some tenets that for Kennedy threatened to become political land mines in a national election. A bundle of contradictions rolled up into one engaging package, Jack Kennedy possessed the affectations of a Brahmin but the inclinations of a liberal Irish Catholic. His favorite priest was not New York’s powerful and vainglorious Cardinal Spellman, so rooted in the intrigue of Rome, but rather the far simpler, unassuming Cushing of Boston, whose earthy manner and plainspoken English appealed to him. At night, Kennedy said his prayers in a routine way, and might occasionally have meant them. Whatever his private religiosity, however, it was overshadowed by his public identification as a Catholic.
OVER THE NEXT several months, Jack Kennedy would be confronted with his own Catholicism probably more than ever before in his life. As he crisscrossed the country as a potential presidential candidate, he began to realize his ineluctable fate—that the upcoming 1960 election would become a test of his faith, in name as a Catholic and perhaps in spirit as well. Before large audiences and in press interviews read by millions, he explained his religion patiently and respectfully, careful not to show anger or resentment as he tried to assuage the prejudices of a suspicious nation.“I am a strong Catholic and I come from a strong Catholic family,” he avowed in April 1959, while being quizzed about his beliefs by Bishop Oxnam’s group of Methodist ministers on tour in Washington, the
first of what would become many such public encounters about his religion.
Before the primaries started, the Kennedys learned that some who didn’t want Jack to run could be found in the Catholic Church itself. Joe Kennedy was incensed to discover that the hierarchy was neither ready for the challenge posed by his son’s candidacy nor willing to assume the risks imposed by a Catholic running for president. As he fumed in his letters to Count Galeazzi, Kennedy simply couldn’t get over what he viewed as an unforgivable act of betrayal. For decades, the Kennedys had been loyal and faithful to the church, with their millions in charitable donations, their honorary titles and secret entreaties to the White House on the Vatican’s behalf, as well as with their genuine devotion to the faith. Joe had spent his adult life preparing for this moment, striving to achieve a breakthrough in America that he assumed everyone in the church wanted—from the pontiff who had once visited his home to his confidant Cardinal Spellman to the nun in the school yard. His son’s best chance was now. Jack could not afford to wait for another day, for another distant opportunity. The tone of Joe Kennedy’s letters to his old friend suggested that Galeazzi might influence the Holy See on this crucial matter in the same way they had collaborated for years. But things in Rome were no longer the same.
KENNEDY NEVER DOUBTED Enrico Galeazzi’s loyalty. After reading news clippings about Jack’s impending candidacy, Galeazzi encouraged Joe to continue “working steadily and quietly for the great goal which is ahead.” For years, the two old friends had dreamed of this quest—a Kennedy running for president—and they would not be deterred by bigots and recalcitrants. To Galeazzi, the benefits to Rome of having a Catholic in the White House were obvious. “Of course the religious issue is beginning to show on front lines,” Galeazzi scribbled in his familiar handwriting, “and that is why the fight will mean a great service not only to your country but to the Church also.” In return, Joe Kennedy expressed his willingness to serve as a conduit between the Vatican and the White House. This liaison was underlined after Allen Dulles, then the CIA director and the brother of Eisenhower’s secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, came to visit the senior Kennedy at his Florida home. After Dulles’s visit, Joe assured his friend in Rome that he’d be willing to act as a go-between with the American government’s top spymaster if Galeazzi and the Pope so desired.“I think that if there is anything that you want me to do, you could let me know at once and I will contact him,” Joe promised in an April 15, 1958, letter written from Palm Beach. “He [Dulles] is very aware of the fact that Jack may be the next President and while he has always been very friendly to me, I think that he is more than ever anxious to please.”