by Thomas Maier
During his brief four-and-a-half-year reign,“Papa John,” as his admirers called him,would open up the Roman Catholic Church to unprecedented changes. He advocated a new age of “ecumenicalism” to end the narrow-minded prejudices of the past, and urged Catholics to embrace other religions in a spirit of Christ’s love, unity and peace. After the Cuban missile crisis, Pope John XXIII spoke forcefully to a world on the brink, with an encyclical teaching about humankind’s responsibility for ending the nuclear threat. His most profound changes came from a convocation of the Vatican Council II. American Catholics no longer spent Mass looking at the back of a priest speaking Latin; instead, they faced a priest praying in their own tongue. In the United States, this new progressive reputation of the Roman church helped Kennedy’s political efforts in America.
After the election, Rose, Bobby and Ted Kennedy all paid separate visits to the Pope, though none garnered the public attention of the first lady’s stop in Rome on her way to India. (“The President is a wonderful man,” the aging pontiff told Norman Cousins. “I have met some of his family. They’re all very fine people. The President is a splendid representative of the American people.”) Jackie Kennedy’s visit to the Vatican was hailed as a success. “Notably absent, back home, was the chorus of complaint that might have been expected from certain quarters, professing scandal at the sight of the wife of the President of the United States forced for protocol reasons to garb herself in medieval black and to genuflect three times before the Holy Father,” wrote one commentator. It was a small but significant sign of a more tolerant America.
During the early 1960s, Pope John XXIII and President John F.Kennedy personified a period of unprecedented hope and reform in the American Catholic Church. It became an all-too-brief epoch inspired by the actions of these two men and what they represented to millions around the world. In many homes, they became symbols of pride, icons whose framed portraits would be venerated beside pictures of Jesus and the Virgin Mary. Ironically, they would never meet, in part because of Kennedy’s lingering concerns about the religion issue, a bittersweet consequence of his election. Nonetheless, the two men, whose most prominent times coincided and complemented each other,would have a profound and lasting impact on American Catholics. Both struggled with reactionary forces within the church and eventually helped to redefine what it meant to be Catholic in the late twentieth century. Similarly, America—with a long-standing view of itself as a WASP nation and its slow acceptance of any kind of minorities,including Catholics—began to transform, dramatically and unalterably. This was the era of “The Two Johns,” as many later called it.
WHEN KENNEDY took office, the rumors spread quickly. Talk of an “Irish Mafia” in the administration, of Catholics being given top–ranking White House jobs, of friends and co-religionists being secreted into the government in disproportionate numbers by a papist president, stirred Protestants and Other Americans United for Separation of Church and State (POAU) to do its own investigation. During the 1960 election, POAU had been a fountainhead of bigotry, openly questioning whether any Roman Catholic could rightly serve as an American president. If their suspicions could be confirmed by Kennedy’s subsequent pattern of hiring and appointments, POAU believed their fears about a Catholic president would be grounded in fact.
By early 1962, an investigation published by C. Stanley Lowell, editor of POAU’s Church and State Review, underlined the deep religious aversions still surrounding Kennedy. The group examined more than a thousand appointments to federal offices and judicial nominations. But the hard facts dispelled suspicions about Kennedy. His cabinet included only one Roman Catholic, the group reported, and his first U.S. Supreme Court appointment was an Episcopalian. POAU’s investigation found Kennedy’s federal appointments were 80 percent Protestant, 15 percent Roman Catholic and 5 percent Jewish—roughly mirroring the religious make-up of the United States. If anything, the Catholic population was slightly underrepresented. Nominations to the federal bench followed a similar pattern. “President Kennedy has been impeccably indifferent to the religious affiliation of his appointees to the highest levels of government,” declared Christian Century, which had voiced much anti-Catholic advocacy during the presidential campaign. The rumors accusing Kennedy of “showing a preference for members of his own faith,” reported the magazine,“are false and are based on groundless speculation.”
In the White House, Kennedy went to great lengths not to appear partial or parochial on religious matters. Despite his own father’s long-time campaign for a U.S. representative at the Vatican, JFK never sent an ambassador, just as he had promised. He attended prayer breakfasts with the Reverend Billy Graham and attended funeral services in Protestant churches. Kennedy aides, such as Deputy Attorney General Nicholas De B. Katzenbach, noticed the president was very concerned with possible criticism by Paul Blanshard and others who might charge he’d reneged on his assurance of church and state separation. This was one vow he didn’t intend to break. As Bobby Kennedy later explained,“He’d taken a position during the course of the campaign, and he wasn’t going to take a position that was different from that.”When Kennedy proposed an education bill with federal funding for private colleges, he invited Blanshard, that avatar of anti- Catholicism for many Americans, to the White House to explain his carefully modulated position. Blanshard’s visit was kept secret, Sorensen later wrote, “so that even visitors in the White House could not know.”
Kennedy wisely kept his Blanshard rendezvous away from the scrutiny of fellow Catholics. Awareness of such a meeting would confirm the murmurs that America’s first Catholic president was a sell-out who ignored his own people—the same Irish Catholics who had voted for his grandfather and supported him throughout his career. None of the issues championed by Cardinal Spellman and the U.S. bishops were taken up by the new president during his first year. Many Catholics expected that, for all his campaign promises, Kennedy would still be more understanding of their concerns than conservative WASP politicians, the kind that traditionally kept minority groups at bay. But Kennedy didn’t abide any of that. Even his admirers and defenders were surprised by how little Kennedy accommodated Catholics in his first several months in office. In January 1962, the editors of America, the Jesuit weekly, observed:
As the first American President to profess the Catholic faith, he was, is and will remain a marked man. . . . How has this first Catholic President conducted himself with respect to his Church? The answer: more or less as almost any Catholic President might have been expected to conduct himself in a land largely dominated, in the cultural sense, by a strong residual Protestant tradition. Thus, for understandable political reasons, Mr. Kennedy has not been inclined to parade or in any way make much of his Irish or his Catholic background.
Put most charitably, the magazine posted a mixed score on Kennedy’s conflicting loyalties: “Harvard 6, Irish 6.” By the second year of Kennedy’s presidency, the expectations had turned sour. Some were just proud and grateful to have a Catholic in the White House, but many in the church hierarchy resented the political handcuffs they perceived Kennedy wore because of his religion.“I thought he was bending over backwards to a certain extent,” recalled Monsignor Francis Hurley, of the U.S. Catholic Conference. “The President assessed that he could count on the Catholic vote because of the over-riding consideration among Catholics for the first time to be able to put a Catholic in office and break down the pattern of antipathy that has existed in the past. . . . But I don’t think it buried the issue by a long shot.” Politically, Kennedy not only felt the American Catholic clergy were no help to him, but at times were out to aid his opponents. And nowhere were these differences more intense and more personal than on the matter of federal aid to parochial schools.
FOR MUCH OF THE twentieth century, successive waves of Catholic immigrants— the Irish, Germans, Italians, Poles—sent their children to parochial schools. In these modest settings, immigrants barely conversant in English learned the language and the more s
ophisticated aspects of becoming an American citizen. By 1961, during the height of America’s baby boom, these schools were overseen by parish priests but effectively run by nuns and lay teachers. The cost of tuition was modest. In Boston and New York, Catholic parochial schools often served as the neighborhood center of cultural, political and social life. Their gyms and cafeterias were filled at night with Catholic Youth Organization (CYO) basketball, bingo games and Knights of Columbus get-togethers. By day, children learned grammar and math and were inculcated in the spiritual truths of their religion.
Historically, Catholic schools proved to be a vehicle for remarkable social and economic ascendancy for generations of immigrants, many of whom faced discrimination almost immediately upon arriving on these shores. By the time of Kennedy’s election, half of the American Catholic population was still composed of immigrants and their children. But many other Catholics had become college graduates, eager to assume top positions in American society. As author and sociologist Reverend Andrew M. Greeley noted, “Almost without warning, and largely unnoticed by the hierarchy, Roman Catholicism was becoming a religion of the well-educated suburban professional-class American.”
For Cardinal Spellman, Catholic schools were sacrosanct, the jewels of each archdiocese. In the Boston diocese of the 1930s, Catholic parents sent their children to these schools as surely as they dutifully attended Mass each Sunday. Spellman fully expected a Catholic elected as U.S. president to understand these bonds of loyalty. But John Kennedy, the nation’s prominent Catholic, took a different path. Catholics noted that Kennedy’s education took place at Choate and Harvard, his year at Canterbury all but forgotten, sometimes obliterated, from his official biographies. However, as a politician from Boston,Kennedy was well aware of the nexus between politics and church-related organizations. He had attended numerous events and ceremonies in parochial schools. While in Congress, John F. Kennedy sponsored a $300 million federal aid-to-education bill that included a provision for bus service to parochial schools. In those days, Kennedy, as a member of the House labor committee, had championed the cause of church leaders and won the approval of parishioners in his district who sought his help for federal school aid. “He had a different view then,” recalled Monsignor Frederick G. Hochwalt, education chief for the National Catholic Welfare Conference.“Two priests from this office helped prepare the school bus provision, and they visited Congressman Kennedy’s office at least six times.”
But with Kennedy’s transformation from local congressman to national political leader, his view on federal aid to parochial schools changed. In 1960, Kennedy adopted a position in accord with that of the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled out direct payment of public funds to sectarian schools. Though Spellman and other bishops expressed misgivings, their resentment didn’t boil over until President Kennedy proposed a large increase in federal aid for education that didn’t include them. His bill would forego assistance to parochial schools—a position similar to Eisenhower’s. Spellman didn’t wait to attack. The cardinal launched his caustic remarks a few days before Kennedy’s inauguration, determined to show who really was the most powerful Catholic in the land. Despite the advice of Hochwalt and others, Spellman sharply criticized Kennedy’s task force on education, saying it was “unthinkable that any American child be denied” this aid because parents selected a “God-centered education.” Kennedy realized he faced a battle with his own church’s elders. “The bishops never took that position during Eisenhower’s eight years,” the president remarked angrily to his aides,“and now they do it to me.”
Ironically,Kennedy’s nuanced view didn’t entirely oppose federal aid for religiously affiliated schools. In addition to his previous support for funding auxiliary services such as buses,Kennedy supported a higher-education bill, eventually passed in 1963, that provided federal aid to colleges, whether public or private. A legal analysis by Kennedy’s Justice Department concluded that such funding was constitutional because none of these college students were required by state law to attend as they were in the secondary and elementary grades overseen by the government. (Years later, scholars would debate whether the secular criteria needed to qualify for these federal dollars offered in the 1960s had robbed Catholic colleges of their identity.) But Kennedy concluded that his main proposal— his Federal Aid to Education Bill in 1961—could not include parochial schools without violating his promise on separation of church and state. When he indicated the bill would apply only to public schools, he sparked one of the most bitterly divisive debates in the nation. Kennedy tried to defuse the hard feelings with self-depreciating wit. “Speaking of the religious issue, I asked the Chief Justice whether he thought our new educational bill was constitutional,” Kennedy quipped. “He said it was constitutional—it hasn’t got a prayer.”
Spellman and the bishops condemned as “discriminatory” any education bill that didn’t cover their schools. Cushing tried to talk them out of it, but the church hierarchy voted to oppose Kennedy’s bill, regardless of its benefits for millions of children, including many Catholics, in public schools. Within a few months, the U.S. Senate passed the measure. By the time it arrived in the House of Representatives, the bishops found a way to stop it. Congressman Jim Delaney, a Democrat on the House Rules Committee, joined several Republicans in defeating the measure. To Kennedy’s embarrassment, the religious bigots who had renounced him in 1960 now supported him in this fight.“We hope that the American people will support President Kennedy against the Bishops of his church,” announced POAU, which applauded the president for his stand. But the school-aid bill was dead.
The Kennedys were livid with Cardinal Spellman for the mischief he wrought so early in Jack’s first year. Watching from a not-too-distant sideline, Joe Kennedy sent an embittered note to Galeazzi at the Vatican about the cardinal’s behavior and his lack of personal loyalty. “During all these times, I continued my friendship with our friend [Spellman], and I like to think that I contributed just as much to that friendship as he did,” Joe wrote, before citing a litany of Spellman slights against his son, including this latest salvo on education.“I consider it another exhibition of the judgment of a man who should know better. As far as I am concerned, I am disgusted, and I prefer not to have any further contacts [with Spellman].” Galeazzi tried to ease Kennedy’s hurt feelings about Spellman. He suggested their old threesome might still act productively as behind-the-scene forces between the White House and Vatican, just as they had done in 1936 with Pacelli’s trip to FDR’s home in upstate New York. As Galeazzi beseeched, “I should accept gladly any personal penalty or suffering to see you two agree again as it was ever since the happy beginning when you were the master of the railway historical trip to Hyde Park. Remember?” But Joe would have none of it.
At a 1961 Gridiron Club dinner, President Kennedy made light of the situation with Spellman and the Catholic hierarchy. With tongue firmly in cheek, he recalled an old joke about Al Smith who, after losing the 1928 presidential campaign because of fears of “a Catholic takeover,” sent a one-word note afterward to the Pope:“UNPACK!”
Then, without missing a beat, Kennedy added,“Well, after my stand on the school bill, I received a one-word wire from the Pope myself. It said, ‘PACK!’”
IN ROME, the old Pope was far more simpatico with the young American president than his cardinal in New York. John Kennedy and John XXIII both favored innovative new approaches, not those bound simply by tradition. Of the two, the aging pontiff proved far more radical. Chosen for the Holy See as a caretaker expected to do nothing, John XXIII transformed his church with a historian’s eye and an ambitious teacher’s sense of vision. By proverbially throwing open the church’s windows, he provided much needed “fresh air” to the stuffy, Machiavellian atmosphere of his predecessor, Pius XII. (He dismissed many of Pius XII’s aides, including the controversial Mother Pasqualina, leaving Count Galeazzi’s powers diminished and Cardinal Spellman without a friendly patron in Rome for the first time in decade
s.)
As a young priest, John XXIII had witnessed the sins of religious bigotry and mass violence first hand. During the Nazi pogroms of World War II, the future Pope,Angelo Roncalli, then a Vatican diplomat in Greece and Turkey, arranged for unsigned baptismal certificates for thousands of Jews to avoid persecution without asking for vows of conversion. He believed innocent suffering from war was unconscionable and that the threat of nuclear annihilation posed a profound moral challenge almost beyond human measure. Pope John realized that the nearly two-thousand-year-old Roman Catholic Church was often cold and too distant from its flock.“Pope John was a phenomenon, one sent by God to bring a little glimpse of Heaven,” said Kennedy’s former adviser, John Cogley.“In the last four years of his life, he would do for our world what Francis of Assisi did for the infinitely less complicated society of medieval Christendom.”
After the Cuban missile crisis, when Krushchev and Kennedy stared down one another with atomic weapons, John XXIII initiated a different approach with the Soviets and their satellite nations called Ostpolitik, “Opening to the East,” that served as an olive branch to Khrushchev. Through intermediaries, Vatican diplomatic relations were opened up with the Kremlin. The Russian leader, who, like Roncalli, had grown up on a farm, cautiously praised the pontiff in Pravda, the state newspaper. At the same time, Pope John moved to safeguard the religious rights of Catholics in the Soviet bloc nations— many already martyred, tortured or imprisoned for their beliefs—and to secure the departure of Hungarian Cardinal Josef Mindszenty from his refuge in the U.S. legation in Budapest. His concerns were raised to another level after the U.S. showdown with the Russians in October 1962. A grateful Kennedy thanked the Pope for his help in resolving the crisis, but the pontiff, a spiritual leader for the world’s 558 million Catholics, set out to address the broader implications of this unacceptable confrontation.