by Thomas Maier
In his masterwork, Pacem in Terris, “Peace on Earth,” which he addressed not to just Catholics but to “all men of good will,” John XXIII issued an eloquent plea. Having witnessed the cruelties and anti-Semitism of his own church, the Pope’s encyclical instructed that every human being has the right “to worship God in accordance with the right dictates of his own conscience, and to profess his religion both in private and in public.” Such words repudiated the old doctrines of Catholic exceptionalism—the insistent cry by armies, crusaders and inquisitioners throughout history that the Mother Church was the one and only true religion. Though he called communism a “false philosophy,” the Pope recognized the capability of socialism in some countries to raise living standards and ease the pain of the poor. Unlike his predecessor, he supported the United Nations, not as a secular threat but as a legitimate forum for seeking international peace and justice. Most notably, he warned about the evils of thermonuclear war, an indiscriminate plague on humankind that only leaders with moral conscience and with God’s help could prevent.
John XXIII’s remarkable teachings were published around the world, often quoted at length in the Western media and printed selectively in the Soviet press. No longer could a Western leader such as Kennedy look to the Vatican to justify the continuation of the Cold War. The old theories of “a just war”—first espoused by Saint Augustine and later expanded by St. Thomas Aquinas—demanded that such conflict be morally justified. Under these old rules, a “just war” was declared by a nation for a righteous cause as a last resort, usually for self-defense, and waged with limited means. Atomic warfare clearly violated these traditional concerns by indiscriminately killing thousands of innocent civilians along with armed combatants. The former concerns about “proportion” were now outdated, for the evil caused by the Bomb’s destruction outstripped any claims of righteousness over a competing political ideology such as communism.
After a brush with nuclear catastrophe, the world was ready for Pope John XXIII’s wisdom and counsel. “In a dark and chilly epoch, the short reign of Pope John XXIII was memorable for light and warmth, qualities generated by his own personality,” writer Evelyn Waugh later explained. “Under Pope Pius XII, the church had inspired resistance to the Communist world with the result that many naïve Catholics had assumed that any government that opposed Communists had a holy cause.” The Kennedys were among these hard-line Catholics; but now, President Kennedy seemed ready for a change.
At the White House, Kennedy teased the press corps for its adoring embrace of the Pope’s encyclical.“You Protestants are always building him up,” he said dryly. Aware of the political consequences of appearing soft on communism, Kennedy didn’t immediately give up the old rhetoric. When the Pope received Khrushchev’s daughter and son-in-law during an April 1963 trip to Rome, the president expressed his concern by sending CIA director John McCone to the Holy See. But Kennedy let the world know that he’d read Pacem in Terris and contemplated it carefully.“As a Catholic, I am proud of it,” said Kennedy about the Pope’s encyclical, “and as an American I have learned from it.”
Indeed, two months afterward, in a commencement address at American University, Kennedy echoed much of the same spirit as John XXIII concerning the nuclear arms race. He ordered his aides to come up with the landmark speech about two weeks after the Pope’s encyclical. As a tangible sign of his good faith, Kennedy announced an immediate unilateral moratorium on the testing of nuclear weapons in the atmosphere. Rather than pursue a headstrong campaign against the Communists,Kennedy offered to end the Cold War and be more conciliatory toward the Soviet Union. The Pope’s encyclical, as well as the Vatican’s entente with Russia, eased the way for Kennedy’s overtures of peace. The lofty, spiritual words from one John’s message in Rome seemed to inspire another’s in Washington. Many called it John Kennedy’s finest speech.“If we cannot end now all our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity,” the president urged. “For, in the final analysis, our most common basic link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.”
POPE JOHN XXIII’s actions helped other progressive measures pushed by the Kennedy administration—not so much by direct contact or coordination, but rather by the Vatican’s setting the stage in America, both spiritually and eventually politically, for Kennedy’s initiatives. American Catholics, particularly conservatives who might have previously attacked conciliatory gestures to the Soviets, were tempered by the Pope’s teachings. The Pope’s 1961 encyclical, Mater et Magistra, took Catholic social thought expressed earlier in Pope Leo’s Rerum Novarum and brought it up-to-date by suggesting that government had the moral duty to provide a social safety net for the disadvantaged. Improving education and medical services for the poor and physically and mentally handicapped was also a moral imperative, the new Pope instructed. John XXIII recognized democracy as likely the best governmental system to bring about social justice.
By far, the greatest changes emanated from John XXIII’s Vatican II ecumenical council, which not only altered church policies but reached into the life of the local parish. Seeking Christian unity, Pope John taught that centuries-old animosities with Protestants must end, even when faced with anti-Catholic bigotry, and that any hint of anti-Semitism must be removed from the church’s teachings. Vatican II opened dialogue on church-state relations, religious freedom and an increased role of the laity in the church. The Pope spoke of “aggiornamento”—the Italian term for updating—while rediscovering the basic roots and meaning of church traditions. There was even serious talk of the church’s modifying its stance on birth control and its barriers for women. At the first session of the council, the Pope encouraged bishops from around the world to speak their minds, though the Roman Curia fought him every step of the way. “We can’t possibly get a council ready by 1963,” one Curia member said to the Pope’s original request. “All right,” he replied, “We’ll have it in 1962.”
The world—Catholics and non-Catholics alike—rejoiced in a wave of good feeling about this Pope and his long-awaited changes.“For if Vatican II was about anything, it was about optimism,” journalist E. J. Dionne wrote from Rome two decades later. “Its documents ring out with the words ‘freedom’ and ‘liberty.’ More than anything,Vatican II shattered a tradition within Catholicism that saw the modern world as an enemy to be fought and resisted. The message many drew from Vatican II was that modernity had a lot to be said for it; at the very least, it had to be assimilated.”
IN AMERICA, Kennedy’s social programs mirrored the same spirit as the Pope’s teachings. Spellman and other conservatives in the American church hierarchy, who might have been even bolder in their challenge to Kennedy, were eclipsed by this new vision of the church’s role in the world. For liberal voices within the church—many of whom had helped John Kennedy in his 1960 campaign—this era was a golden moment, perhaps the only time during the twentieth century that they felt fully in tune with the Holy See. Jesuit theologian John Courtney Murray, whose writings argued convincingly for a modern separation of church and state rather than a medieval theocracy, became one of the most prominent churchmen of this era. Immediately after Kennedy’s election, Time magazine devoted a cover story to Murray and these dramatic changes in the church and its effect on America.“In his view, Catholics can make a decisive contribution—perhaps the decisive contribution—to an American society in spiritual crisis,” the magazine reported.“Whether or not the Catholics have been the true custodians of the American consensus, as Murray would have it, there is no denying that a new era has begun for Catholics in America.”
Murray, and a few progressive Catholic theologians who came into prominence during the Kennedy era, had previously endured estrangement from their conservative brethren in the Catholic clergy. During the 1950s, Murray was instructed by the Roman Curia not to express his view on church and state matters—his academic specialty—just as Ro
me had earlier forbidden Jesuit paleontologist Teihard de Chardin from publishing anything but works on scientifically technical matters while he was alive. Most of de Chardin’s profound theological insights about the role of God in the evolutionary process and other earthly matters were published after his death. “In the Catholic Church of the 20th Century,” one priest told Time, “the grace of martyrdom has been given to the intellectual.”
John XXIII’s spiritual protection allowed critics, some of whom might have been called heretics by a different pontiff, to express their concerns and suggest reforms. The young Swiss-born priest, Hans Küng, wrote a best-selling book that argued the highly centralized church should allow more freedom and decisionmaking to regional bishops and laity. “Even today the spirit of the Inquisition and unfreedom has not died out,” Küng declared to packed auditoriums as he toured America. Küng was selected to add intellectual heft to the Pope’s reforms by serving as a peritus, “theological expert,” for Vatican II. Pope John XXIII was well aware of the curia’s opposition to his reforms, and their condemnations of him as “the Red Pope” for supposedly favoring socialism.“They are men of zeal, I am sure, but they are not running the church,” he confided to a friend. “I am in charge, and I won’t have anyone else trying to stop the momentum of the council’s first session.” Both Küng and Murray embodied a more truly catholic kind of church, one not obsessed with secrecy and subversion, but that preached a gospel of Christian love and tolerance. To the delight and surprise of many in this era, the powers in Rome and Washington did not resist these changes. As Küng recalled years later, “Pope John XXIII and John Kennedy—together, they embodied our hope.”
AN INTERMEDIARY between the two leaders was Cardinal Richard Cushing—Kennedy’s favorite priest—a guileless man with a good heart, much like the Pope himself. Cushing became a vocal supporter of both men, calling them the “two great Johns.” During the Vatican II sessions, Cushing pushed for a declaration on religious liberty and ecumenicalism, including a specific statement in support of Jews.“More changes have been made in the church since the Second Vatican Council than in all the years since the Protestant Reformation,” Cushing declared, a bit of hyperbole not far from the truth. He contended that the peaceful measures of meetings and negotiations to ease the threat of nuclear war, as spelled in John XXIII’s Pacem in Terris encyclical, had been put into practice by John Kennedy during the Cuban missile crisis.
In Boston, Cushing lived up to his public rhetoric, helping the old Irish and Italian neighborhoods adapt to this new ecumenical era. Protestants and Jews were embraced by Catholics rather than shunned, resented or beaten. He visited synagogues and huddled with Protestant ministers about such thorny issues as interfaith marriages. As Thomas H. Connor observed in his history of Boston’s Irish, Cardinal Cushing “helped define a new level of human relations in an archdiocese theretofore noted for bitter and sometimes violent conflicts among people of different religious, ethnic, and racial backgrounds.”With Spellman and other conservative bishops kept at a distance by the Pope, Cardinal Cushing stepped forward as the most outspoken and visible spokesman of this newly revitalized American Catholic Church.“If there is a bit of the Last Hurrah in Boston’s crusty and contrary Cardinal Cushing, there is also a generous measure of the new spirit of Pope John XXIII,” observed Time, which devoted another cover story to this Kennedy-affiliated prelate. “He personally illustrates the stirring of that placid giant of Roman Catholicism, the church in the U.S.”
To be sure, Cushing, the son of Irish immigrants, could make a defensive statement or two about their treatment.“Forty years ago, the only places for an Irishman in Boston were in the Church or in politics; as far as banking was concerned ‘Irish need not apply,’” he begrudged. Like Cardinal O’Connell, he once suggested that Catholics lose their faith in secular institutions such as Harvard. But his admiration for the new Pope and his friend Jack Kennedy was boundless, a sentiment returned by the White House. “The president felt closer to him than any other clergyman,” Robert Kennedy observed. Cushing later said that Kennedy dedicated himself to two major goals: to avoid war in a nuclear age and “to create a lasting image as the first Catholic President.”
WHEN JOHN XXIII DIED in 1963, the whole world mourned. America’s view of Catholics, once so intolerant and pedantic, was somehow different because of this pontiff and the new president. The papacy of John XXIII and the policies of John Kennedy had, as historian William V. Shannon wrote,“substantially affected the reputation and cultural environment of the American Irish.” No longer perceived as defensive or parochial, the immigrant’s church in America was finally accepted, even if some stereotypes still lingered. Because of Kennedy’s actions as president, aide Ted Sorensen wrote,“the Catholic Church in this country became less subject to recriminations from without and more subject to reform from within.”
With Pope John’s passing, the White House issued its official condolences. Kennedy agreed to meet soon with the newly elected Pope Paul VI. When the president arrived at the North American College in Rome shortly afterward, a somber group of cardinals met him, including the one from Boston. With a broad smile emerging on his face, Cushing, a large, grappling man, approached the president and gave him a mock punch in the solar plexus.“Hi, Jack!” he proclaimed.
The assemblage of cardinals and bishops were shocked by Cushing’s behavior. His jocular gesture, like a boxer in the ring, underscored the friendliness between the two.“It was getting awful formal there so I wanted to shake him up a bit,” Cushing explained sheepishly.
During his audience with the new Pope, Kennedy didn’t kneel and kiss the pontiff ’s ring—a gesture made by Al Smith that had incited his anti-Catholic critics. Instead, Jack Kennedy bowed and simply shook hands. White House officials carefully underlined it was an “unofficial” visit for Kennedy, so as not to stir fears of some papal conspiracy. A Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, hinted that the United States might want to reestablish diplomatic relations with the Holy See, particularly given the central role the Vatican played in Cold War negotiations with the Soviets. Aware of the sentiments back home, however, JFK kept his vow not to name a Vatican ambassador. On this trip to Rome, Kennedy felt confident enough to suggest something that had never been done before, something that would have certainly caused a nativist riot earlier in his nation’s history: he invited the new Pope to visit America.
Chapter Thirty
Doing the Right Thing
JAMES BALDWIN WASN’T buying any of Robert Kennedy’s jive. His heavy hooded eyelids could barely conceal his contemptuous glare.
“Your family has been here for three generations,” Baldwin scolded.“My family has been here far longer than that. Why is your brother at the top while we are still so far away?” The rhetorical question lingered in the air for all to contemplate.
Only a day earlier, the attorney general had asked Baldwin to set up a meeting in New York with his friends—artists, writers and entertainers— to talk about race. Baldwin, the celebrated author of The Fire Next Time, had been recently featured on the cover of Time magazine and portrayed as the angry but brilliant voice of America’s restless Negro population. Kennedy said he wanted to know what Baldwin and his friends were thinking.
Their meeting in May 1963 took place at Joseph P. Kennedy’s spacious Central Park South apartment. To these invitees, the Kennedy place, with its trappings of a self-made millionaire many times over, exuded American wealth and privilege—the forces of white supremacy that had once enslaved African-Americans and blatantly discriminated against them with Jim Crow laws, lynching and constant indignities. Attorney General Robert Kennedy certainly didn’t view his father’s New York residence in this same way. In Bobby’s estimate, this apartment reflected his father’s achievements, the triumph of one hardworking Irish Catholic in an often hostile world, an example for other minorities to emulate, not abhor.
At one point, Kennedy suggested to Baldwin and his guests—a dis
tinguished group that included social psychologist Kenneth B. Clark, Lorraine Hansberry, author of A Raisin in the Sun, singers Lena Horne and Harry Belafonte, and a few whites such as actor Rip Torn—that Negroes must be patient, that they should consider the example of his own family. Kennedy then proceeded to lecture about his family’s roots and how Irish Catholics were able to overcome discrimination in this country. Somehow, Kennedy seemed to view Negroes as just another immigrant group on its way to acceptance. Not too long ago, “the Irish were not wanted” in Boston, Bobby reminded them, yet his brother, the great-grandson of an immigrant, made it to the White House.“You should understand that this is possible— that in the next fifty years or so, a Negro can be President,” he insisted.
The assembled guests, no matter how sympathetic to the attorney general, listened in utter disbelief. Baldwin’s dressing down expressed their frustration with Kennedy’s analogy to the Irish. “As a group, we were hardly impressed by Bobby’s assertion that he understood black suffering because of the discrimination his own family had endured as the result of being Irish,” Clark later said. “After all, they were white.” As Belafonte recalled decades later, “White, Irish-Catholic, anti-Communist, wealthy—all of these were, for us, obstacles.”
In the cauldron of American racial politics, there was little wiggle room for historical analogies about religious and racial bigotry. As immigrants, the Irish had experienced discrimination and attacks from the very same white Anglo-Saxon Protestants who had enslaved African-Americans, and they, too, erupted occasionally in their own violent riots and protests. In Boston, several historians noted that Irish Catholics were treated worse than blacks, and some called the Irish “the white Negro” by means of comparison. Yet by most contemporary American standards, the previous suffering of white immigrant groups generally did not compare in size or scope to the experience of blacks in America, the descendants of those who arrived in chains on slave ships. Racism and slavery were America’s original sin, a moral calamity not yet fully absolved. The social and economic progress of other minority groups—indeed the success of men such as Joseph P. Kennedy— only served to highlight the raw inequities faced by African-Americans, and the feeling that bigotry would fade in America only if your skin color was white.