Not long after assuming office, he pledged to refrain from “all argument with our non-Catholic neighbors and from all purely defensive talk about Catholicism.” That position was tested early by a Jesuit priest named Leonard Feeney, who accused the Jesuits’ own Boston College of heresy for teaching that salvation was possible outside the Catholic Church. Cushing withdrew Feeney’s priestly authority, but the dissident only intensified his crusade, taking to the Boston Common, where he denounced Jews as “horrid, degenerate, hook-nosed perverts.” Cushing had lived through the Christian Front’s wartime xenophobia and had no intention of presiding over its revival. As a fund raiser, he had long cultivated wealthy Jews; moreover, his sister had married a Jew, whom the Cardinal called “the best Christian I know.” Asked about Feeney, he would rasp impatiently, “Nobody can tell me that Christ died on Calvary for any select group!” In 1953, the Vatican upheld Cushing’s stand by excommunicating the renegade priest.
But Cushing had a polemical streak too. He jousted peevishly with Protestant critics like Paul Blanshard, and on at least one issue—the menace of international Communism—he was as zealous as his predecessor. The anti-Communist crusade held a special appeal for American Catholics; intensely Catholic and American, it demonstrated at last the compatibility of faith and patriotism. As the cold war deepened, New York’s Francis Cardinal Spellman and his assistant, Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, fulminated against “Satan-inspired Communists” and “anti-Christian minds drenched and drugged in the devil’s cauldron.” Cushing stood squarely in that tradition. After Yugoslavia’s Archbishop Stepinac was imprisoned, Cushing denounced the “bloody and barbaric” behavior of the “Red Fascists.” Soon he broadened his indictment to include “the parlor pinks, the fellow travelers, and out-and-out Communists who thrive in our midst.” He formed a close friendship with J. Edgar Hoover, who often assigned FBI men to escort him on his travels. He once called Robert Welch the most “dedicated anti-Communist in the country” and endorsed Welch’s John Birch Society. As for Senator Joseph McCarthy—who enjoyed massive support among Boston’s Irish Catholics—Cushing never explicitly backed him, but scrupulously avoided anything that might be taken for criticism. Asked for his opinion of the Senator, he once responded, “The whole thing depends on how you look at Communism. If you look upon it as one of the greatest evils that has attempted to undermine Western civilization, naturally you do everything you can to save our way of life from the inroads of evil.”
During those early years, Cushing seemed torn by conflicting impulses—at times pulled toward a new ecumenical openness, at times toward an irascible ghetto Catholicism. What resolved that tension, putting a distinctive stamp on his regime, was the powerful influence of “the two Johns”—John Fitzgerald Kennedy and Pope John XXIII—the first redefining what it meant to be Catholic in America, the second what it meant to be Catholic at all.
When Cushing first met Joseph P. Kennedy in the mid-thirties, they didn’t much care for each other. “The trouble with you two,” a friend remarked, “is you’re like peas in a pod.” Soon the financier and the priest discovered some mutual interests—money, politics, and anti-Communism, in that order. In August 1946, during his first congressional campaign, Jack Kennedy presented Cushing with a family check for $650,000 to build the Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr., Memorial Hospital, the largest gift the Archdiocese had yet received and one calculated to please the district’s Catholic voters. In years to come, the Kennedys added millions more for a whole array of hospitals, homes, and Catholic centers. According to one of Cushing’s principal financial aides, the Cardinal worked out a cozy arrangement with the senior Kennedy: whenever the Ambassador wished, Cushing kicked back fifty cents on the dollar, “laundered” money available for any purpose the Kennedys might select, usually politics.
Cushing performed other services—raising campaign funds for Jack and bringing influence to bear on his behalf with the Catholic governor of Pennsylvania. But his most important contribution was his endorsement of Jack’s political catechism. “I am not the Catholic candidate for President,” Kennedy told Protestant ministers in Houston. “I am the Democratic Party’s candidate for President who happens also to be a Catholic…. I believe in an America where the separation of Church and state is absolute—where no Catholic prelate would tell the President (should he be a Catholic) how to act.” Cushing—the prelate everyone had in mind—emphatically agreed. “Senator Kennedy would resent absolutely having a Cardinal, a bishop, or a priest telling him how to act. I don’t know anyone who would try to tell him.” Jack rewarded his “spiritual adviser” with an invitation to deliver the inaugural invocation, which he did at stentorian volume and mind-boggling length.
While his celebrity grew from association with John Kennedy, Cushing owed his rise in the Church to Pope John. Pius XII had been in no hurry to elevate the outspoken American, but the rotund peasant’s son who became John XXIII immediately recognized a kindred spirit and, within six weeks of mounting the Throne of Peter in November 1958, made Cushing a Cardinal. Boston’s Archbishop knew little of John before he became Pope, “but when I saw him going to the prisoners, to old folks, to the laborers, even to the Communists, I said, ‘Good God, that’s my man!’ ” Later, Cushing called John “the only man who ever understood me” and “the best reproduction of Christ that I have ever met.” Indeed, the Pope and his new Cardinal were remarkably alike—earthy, pragmatic, candid, and spontaneous. Few bishops anywhere were more likely than Cushing to accept John’s judgment that humanity did not consist of friends and enemies of the Church but of a multitude of winnable souls. And few so enthusiastically welcomed his determination to “let fresh air into the Church” by calling an Ecumenical Council. But the sessions were conducted in Latin, a language Cushing had never mastered (“I didn’t know whether it was Chinese or Eskimo,” he admitted later), and he was largely indifferent to theology (“Do good and avoid evil was about as far as he went,” one longtime aide recalls, “and even that was subject to interpretation”). The following year, Cushing led the fight for a Council declaration on religious freedom with an eloquent speech citing Thomas Jefferson on “a decent respect for the opinions of mankind,” but the first Council session wasn’t three weeks old before he was back in Boston, doing what he did best—raising money.
No less an authority than Jackson Martinelli, Pius XII’s financial adviser, once observed, “There is not much difference between Standard Oil of New Jersey and the Catholic Church’s operations. The only difference is that Standard produces oil and the Catholic Church produces a way of thought and life.” Of necessity, Cushing devoted disproportionate energy to raising money. After World War II, Boston’s Church followed its constituents into the suburbs, establishing eighty-five new parishes between Cape Cod and the New Hampshire border. In principle, each parish was responsible for raising or borrowing funds to build its own church, rectory, and parochial school, while the diocese concentrated on erecting seminaries, hospitals, regional high schools, and homes for the elderly. But Cushing was so impatient to get buildings underway that he often advanced a struggling parish the money out of diocesan funds; then, if its financial difficulties persisted, he forgave the principal, even the interest, for years to come. Meanwhile, he offered financial inducements to bring some sixty new Catholic orders into the diocese. His growing empire took staggering sums to build and maintain. Over and above the ordinary parish collections, the Cardinal needed $12 million a year, or about $30,000 a day.
Cushing was renowned for shameless—but folksy—fund raising. He’d go anywhere for a $1,000 fee and his speeches to communion breakfasts and Knights of Columbus dinners invariably ended: “Now we’ll take up a collection.” Even his table-hopping paid off as diners stuffed ten-dollar bills in the folds of his cassock. He got other things too. Once, when several nuns explained their needs, Cushing dipped into his pocket and came up with a handful of diamond rings. “Some of my little old ladies gave them to me,” he said. “Here, why don’t y
ou raffle them off and see what you can get.”
He rang every change on solicitation: at smokers, bazaars, lawn fetes, parish reunions, hockey games, theatricals, and spectacles at Blinstrub’s Village, a South Boston nightclub which hosted so many of the Cardinal’s charity events it became known as “Boston’s Vatican.” He raised even more money through a network of professional and business guilds—St. Luke’s for physicians, St. Apollonia’s for dentists, the Caritas Guild for liquor dealers. The telephone, gas, and electric companies and the big department stores were elaborately organized. Employees gave a quarter a week to their room captain, who passed it on to the floor captain, who gave it to the building captain, who took it directly to the Cardinal. And Cushing personally raised funds from major contributors like Middlesex County Sheriff Howard Fitzpatrick or former Governor Alvan Fuller, who each year invited the Cardinal to lunch, placing a $100,000 check under his plate. Cushing was preoccupied with finding new sources of cash. “I raise money,” he told an aide. “What else am I good for?”
But as the years went by, and money began drying up, the Cardinal piled bank loans, bond issues, and personal advances ($5 million from the Kennedys alone) into a towering, but rickety, financial pyramid. For a time his credit was funneled through two small Catholic banks, which raised money from correspondent banks. Then Cushing struck a surprising deal with Boston’s First National Bank, an unlikely partner for an Irish churchman. Not so many years before, Jim Curley had become so exasperated with the starchy First he had threatened to flood its vaults with water from a municipal main unless the bank advanced him funds to meet the city payroll. But Boston’s bankers had come to terms with the Irish. It was the resourceful Ephron Catlin who persuaded Cushing to adopt a technique the First had employed to bail out Hollywood’s troubled movie industry. The bank would loan money to the movie companies, then take its cut directly from the box office. Catlin proposed that its loans to the Archdiocese be recovered straight from the parish collection plates. “Cushing loved it,” Catlin recalls. “For years he’d been looking for a way to get his hands on more of the parish money, although I don’t think he liked it when I compared him to Sam Goldwyn.” But soon even the First could no longer keep the Archdiocese afloat on its sea of debt. The Cardinal called on several New York banks, who refused him more credit. By 1967, his debt had reached an unprecedented $80 million. During his last decade, Cushing’s obsession with money affected every diocesan activity, including efforts to grapple with the city’s growing racial polarization.
Cushing had showed an early sympathy with blacks. In 1953, he paid $500 for a life membership in the NAACP and, three years later, he established St. Richard’s Church in Roxbury for Boston’s 1,000 black Catholics. Few dissenters questioned such ethnic segregation—then the pattern in most large dioceses—and the black community enthusiastically welcomed the gesture. Cushing gave the church his own name and frequently celebrated Mass there with the white Josephite priests. The Cardinal was genuinely popular in Roxbury at that time, responding with the same gracious patronage he bestowed on the infidels of Togo and Tanganyika (Catholic rectories in those days still displayed ceramic “tar babies” in which visitors stuck quarters for the African missions). “Open our hands and hearts to all the oppressed and afflicted,” Cushing wrote in an early leaflet called “A Prayer for Brotherhood.” On the cover was a photograph of the Archbishop beaming benevolently on a fetching little Negro girl as she kissed his ring.
But most Boston blacks never saw a priest, much less a Cardinal. They were Baptists, Methodists, or Pentecostals, which gave Protestant churches a greater purchase on black lives. Moreover, Boston’s Irish had a legacy of hostility to abolitionism. Not surprisingly, as the sixties began, it was liberal white Protestants—heirs to Theodore Parker and William Lloyd Garrison—who took the lead in reaching out to the black community. In July 1960, a Protestant institute called Packard Manse—hitherto dedicated to ecumenical exchange with Catholics and Jews—opened a branch in Roxbury. “Suburban captivity is the greatest threat to Protestantism,” it proclaimed. “It is time to reach out to the inner city.” To head the new operation, it chose John Harmon, a white Episcopal priest already living in Roxbury. Later, Harmon persuaded his friend Harvey Cox, a professor at Andover-Newton Theological School, to move nearby as an act of “Christian witness.” The Manse pioneered a series of “black-white dialogues” in Roxbury. Then, in November 1963—impelled to take more eye-catching action—Harmon, Cox, and twelve other Protestant clergymen from New England were arrested during a civil rights march in Williamston, North Carolina.
The arrests were big news back in Boston. After a week in jail—during which they sent a letter home saying, “We now know that in Christ there is no East or West, no South or North, no black or white. O Lord, gather together all separated brothers!”—the clergymen returned to a heroes’ welcome. But for a few Catholic priests, the event was cause for chagrin. Father Shawn Sheehan, a professor at St. John’s Seminary, wept bitterly—partly in sympathy for his brothers in Christ, but principally in shame because no Catholic priest had yet had the courage to put himself in jeopardy for racial justice.
Sheehan thereupon organized the first clerical demonstration in archdiocesan history. Through a driving rainstorm, thirty priests and a like number of Protestant clergymen walked silently in a “penitential procession” around the Boston School Committee, City Hall, and the State House. The demonstration took place just days after Louise Day Hicks had been resoundingly reelected, but the priests’ spokesman maintained that it was not directed at Mrs. Hicks or any other politician. “In penance,” he said, “the accusing finger is pointed only at self. We wish to silently bear witness and admit our guilt for all forms of segregation in the Boston area.”
The activist priests felt particularly guilty about the Catholic stance toward the changing inner city, for as the Irish abandoned their old neighborhoods in the South End, Roxbury, and Dorchester, they left the Church’s outposts there in profound disarray. Most of the blacks and Puerto Ricans who replaced the Irish were, at best, indifferent to priestly ministrations, at worst hostile (one church had to lock its doors during the day because intruders used the confessionals as urinals). Many older priests had difficulty coping with their new constituents. In Edwin O’Connor’s The Edge of Sadness, Father Hugh Kennedy has given up on his polyglot South End parish until an acerbic colleague mocks his parochialism: “We all know what a real parish is … a fine, big, old-fashioned, well-kept church with—and here’s the important thing—lots of Irish to put inside it!… The kind of people who can sing ‘Ave Maria’ inside the church, but can give you a chorus of ‘There’s a Little Devil Dancing in Your Laughing Eyes’ on the way home. Those are the people the Church was really meant for, wouldn’t you say, Hugh?”
In 1963, seven students at St. John’s Seminary set out to change that mind-set, to infuse the inner-city church with a new sense of mission. At first the group—sometimes known as “the Magnificent Seven”—met behind closed doors at the seminary, reading the pronouncements of Vatican II, pondering their implications for traditional Catholic theology and social action. That summer they spent two weeks in the loft of Roxbury’s St. Richard’s Church, taking a parish census during the day, talking with black activists at night. The next summer, they came back for a full month, and after their ordination, three of them obtained permanent assignments in Roxbury, determined to revitalize its moribund churches; but their ambitious scheme quickly foundered for lack of wholehearted support from the Cardinal.
Sympathetic though he might be with their goals, Cushing was uneasy with priestly activism, particularly with anything that smacked of civil disobedience. His discomfort surfaced in February 1964 during the second black boycott of the city’s schools. In a television interview, Cushing called the boycott “a very, very dangerous thing. I am all for human rights—for every living, breathing human soul. But there is a better way of attaining these rights than by violating
laws of society and by endangering the community by sending a number of children, emotionally upset, through the city’s streets.”
But two events in the spring of 1964 profoundly affected the Cardinal and his advisers. The first occurred on St. Patrick’s Day. Distressed by the refusal of white working-class Bostonians to support its challenge of de facto segregation, the NAACP, for the first time, entered the South Boston parade. Its float bore a large portrait of the recently assassinated John Kennedy and beside it, in bold green letters: “From the Fight for Irish Freedom to the Fight for U.S. Equality.” As it lumbered onto Dorchester Street near St. Augustine’s Church, four teenagers leaped into the street brandishing their own homemade banner, decorated with shamrocks and reading: “Go home, nigger. Long live the spirit of independence in segregated Boston.” Tomatoes, eggs, cherry bombs, bottles, and beer cans rained down on the float. A brick shattered the windshield and broke the driver’s glasses. Police moved in, escorting the float to safety. The next day, the NAACP likened the incident to “the viciousness you would expect in New Orleans and the backwoods of Mississippi.”
The second incident took place eight days later when two priests from St. Bridget’s Church in Lexington—Father Tom MacLeod and Father John Fitzpatrick—were arrested trying to integrate a restaurant in Williamston, North Carolina. The Shamrock Café—the name rang ironically back in Boston—was just a few yards down the road from the spot where the Protestant clergymen had been arrested six months before. MacLeod and Fitzpatrick were the first American priests ever to be arrested for civil rights activity. MacLeod was the leader of the Lexington Civil Rights Committee who had once chastised CORE for demonstrating against housing discrimination on the Lexington Green; but like other priests of his generation, he had grown increasingly uncomfortable with his Church’s passivity on the race issue. When the two priests arrived back at St. Bridget’s after several nights in jail, their pastor, Monsignor George Casey—himself an ardent civil rights activist—welcomed them warmly: “You boys have a lot of spunk. You’ve brought us right back into the Ecumenical Movement.” Cushing—annoyed because the pair hadn’t consulted him—wasn’t so pleased at first, but as congratulatory telegrams poured into the Chancery, the Cardinal came to see some merit in their action.
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