Widespread condemnation of the St. Patrick’s Day incident and praise for the young priests encouraged the Cardinal to speak out. On Pentecost Sunday in April, he delivered his strongest statement yet on the race issue: “I call this city and its citizens to justice. I call them to see in their Negro neighbors the face of Christ himself. I call them to change their hearts and to raise their hands, before the evils that we are tolerating call down the wrath of God upon his forgetful people…. To every believer, I say love all men and especially love Negroes, because they have suffered so much from lack of love.”
Only three months later, after rioting in Harlem and Rochester, Cushing sounded a more passionate note. Denouncing “the monstrous evil of racism,” he said, “It is time we were disturbed, it is time we were shaken! We have been content to do things the easy way, to console with soft words and promises, to temporize and be patient in the face of inexcusable social evils…. In this hour, if the men of God are silent, the very stones will cry out!”
The voice was Cushing’s, the sentiments largely his, but the passion, the commitment, the words themselves came from Monsignor Francis J. Lally, Cushing’s ghostwriter and conscience on such matters. Lally was an unusual churchman: a Boston Irish priest who had risen from an insular background to serve on the executive board of the National Council of Christians and Jews and the national committee of UNESCO. Cushing made him editor of the Pilot, the archdiocesan newspaper, a pulpit from which he inveighed weekly against narrow parochialism and racial injustice. Later, he became chairman of the Boston Redevelopment Authority, a role in which he outraged Irish neighborhoods. To the Cardinal’s more traditional advisers, Lally was anathema. Robert Welch, founder of the John Birch Society, dubbed him “the Red Monsignor” and urged Cushing to get rid of him, but Lally was custodian of one side of Cushing’s nature and the Cardinal relied on him to give it expression.
To build a civil rights constituency, Lally formed a Boston unit of the Catholic Interracial Council, and on St. Patrick’s Day 1965, a year after the NAACP float had been attacked, some six hundred council members entered the South Boston parade. Just one week before, some of those same Catholics had marched with Martin Luther King in Selma, Alabama, when James Reeb, the Unitarian minister from Boston, was beaten to death by white segregationists. Moved now by evangelical zeal, they sought once again to equate the civil rights movement with Ireland’s liberation struggle. The marchers—among them, 150 priests and nuns in clerical garb—carried banners stating: “The rights of every man are threatened when the rights of one man are threatened—John F. Kennedy” and “Beg Un Booah Ling,” Gaelic for “We Shall Overcome.” When they sang the civil rights anthem, they alternated it with lusty choruses of “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling.” At first they were received with deference, even a spattering of applause, but rounding the corner onto Broadway, they were greeted by beer-drinking youths who pelted them with jeers and missiles. David Nelson, the council’s president, was hit on the leg with a bottle; an ice-cream cone splattered a priest’s shoulder; somebody spat a mouthful of beer in a black man’s face. Prancing in front of the column, one kid yelled at the priests, “Hey, Father, you want your sister to marry one?” Father Ernest Serino, a husky Italian priest just back from Selma, had had enough. Lunging from the line of march, he grabbed the kid by the lapel, growling, “Shut your mouth or I’ll shut it for you.” The boy seemed ready to strike the priest before police rushed in to separate them.
Increasingly, Boston’s Church found itself pincered between the newly aggressive black community and the angrily resisting white neighborhoods. By mid-1965, that struggle focused on the bruising tug-of-war between the NAACP and the Boston School Committee. Officially at least, the Archdiocese had thrown its weight behind the black community; Cushing himself was a member of the Kiernan Commission, which found in April that Boston’s racially imbalanced schools represented a “serious conflict with the American creed of equal opportunity,” and Lally in the Pilot warned: “We must pay for our wickedness as a people and do justice in the fullest sense to the Negro child.” But some blacks believed that the Church could have done much more. Cushing’s political clout was widely appreciated—legislators were still asking what “Lake Street” thought. When business interests wanted to redevelop the old New Haven Railroad yards as the Prudential Center, it was Cushing they asked to intervene with City Hall; when Boston University needed an exit from Storrow Drive, it was to Cushing they went for help. Why, blacks wondered, didn’t the Cardinal do the same for them? When Louise Day Hicks won reelection that November with 64 percent of the vote, the NAACP charged that “neither bishops, priests, monsignors nor Cardinal Cushing have tried to do anything to improve the Negro’s position.”
There were those who believed that if Cushing had intervened behind the scenes he could have nipped Mrs. Hicks’s crusade in the bud. The chairwoman was known to be a devout Catholic, a dutiful communicant; why, they asked, couldn’t the Cardinal simply call her in and say, “Louise, I won’t tolerate this in my Archdiocese. It has to stop”? (If that failed, they argued, he should excommunicate her as Archbishop Cody of New Orleans had once excommunicated the virulent segregationist Leander Perez.)
In fact, Cushing may have made one such effort. In the summer of 1965, he invited Mrs. Hicks to his residence. No one else was present and Cushing has left no account of what transpired. According to Mrs. Hicks, the Cardinal presented her with a crucifix, to which she responded, “You’re giving me everything but your support, Your Eminence.”
“Louise, my dear,” the Cardinal is reported to have said, “you don’t know what kind of pressure I’m under. The Negroes want me to go down to the School Committee and march with those demonstrators.”
“Why don’t you do that, Your Eminence,” Louise says she answered. “Then come upstairs and receive my resignation.”
“From the School Committee?”
“No, from the Church.”
Some doubt Mrs. Hicks’s version. But whatever happened that day, Cushing henceforth seemed wary of Mrs. Hicks. In 1966, under pressure from the Catholic Interracial Council, he established a Human Rights Commission to handle civil rights matters for the Archdiocese. Its director, Father Paul Rynne, went straight to Mrs. Hicks in an effort to moderate her stand. A few days later, he received a call from the Cardinal: “Let me give you some advice,” Cushing said. “Don’t bother that woman. I’m warning you, she’s a tough bird.”
What Cushing feared wasn’t so much Mrs. Hicks herself as the effect of a public squabble with her on his financial deficit. Many of his biggest donors were traditional Irish Catholics who would deeply resent any effort to restrain the chairwoman. This danger was underlined by the Cardinal’s coterie of conservative advisers who gathered in the pine-paneled basement of Cushing’s chauffeur, Al Wasilauskas, for a few drinks at the end of the day. The Cardinal was getting out of touch with his constituency, they warned. By 1966, Cushing began cracking down on Catholic activists. After the Interracial Council objected to an ex-military man he had appointed as its chaplain, the Cardinal angrily withdrew the appointment but, along with it, his support for the council. Later that year, he announced that he was going to fire “that Communist” at Emmanuel College, an outspoken young nun named Marie Augusta Neal, who had been active in the black community. When Emmanuel’s president intervened on her behalf, the Cardinal relented, but warned Sister Marie Augusta to “stay out of Roxbury.”
Cushing’s growing timidity was reinforced by his suspicions about Martin Luther King. The Cardinal felt most comfortable in a missionary relationship to the black community, in which the white Church was the benefactor to a largely powerless people; he was less easy as blacks began to assume control of their own destiny. Toward King, who personified that new aggressiveness, Cushing’s attitude was largely defined by his friend J. Edgar Hoover, who showed him surveillance reports suggesting that King was both a Communist and a sexual degenerate. Cushing largely accepted that eviden
ce and for more than a decade, while publicly permitting Lally to praise King in his name, he privately kept his distance. After King was assassinated, Lally put out the obligatory eulogy, but when the wife of the Democratic state chairman asked Cushing to request all Catholics to wear mourning bands for a week, he rasped, “Lady, why don’t you go back to your kitchen!”
The Cardinal’s retreat provoked an uprising in his own ranks. Some of “the Magnificent Seven” were still in Roxbury in June 1967 when blacks took to the streets in four nights of rioting. They rushed into the troubled district, eager to help, but angry blacks would have none of it. “Get off the street, Father,” they said. “We don’t want your Roman collars out here.” Wounded by this rejection and impatient with Cushing’s intransigence, twenty inner-city priests met at Shawn Sheehan’s rectory to consider how the Church could be made more “relevant” to blacks. Eventually, they established an Association of Boston Urban Priests to push the Archdiocese into bolder positions. Their first step was unprecedented: open intervention in that fall’s City Council election. Twenty-five association members endorsed Tom Atkins, the NAACP leader who only two years before had denounced the Archdiocese for failing to throw its moral weight against Louise Day Hicks’s reelection. Warning that American cities could soon become “veritable concentration camps of the poor, the powerless and the voiceless,” newspaper ads urged voters to “join us in working and voting for Tom Atkins.”
Six months later, the association waded into even more troubled waters, condemning the Vietnam War and urging diversion of military spending into a “massive national effort” to solve the urban crisis. After Martin Luther King’s death, the association grew still angrier, reflecting the Catholic radicalism then stirring across the country. This was the era when Daniel and Philip Berrigan became “criminals for peace,” when young seminarians at Woodstock College destroyed Dow Chemical files, when the Catonsville Nine splattered blood on draft records. In Boston, Catholic activism continued to focus on the race issue. On April 4, 1969, the first anniversary of King’s assassination, Faneuil Hall was filled for a memorial service. Abruptly, Father John White, one of the association’s founders, rose to say: “I cannot remain here because the Church I represent has very little to do with the people and the causes which meant so much to Dr. King and for which he gave his life. The poor, the oppressed, the victims of war are not the priority of the Catholic Church in Boston.” Then he walked out.
Two months later, the dissident priests took their boldest step yet. Normally a pastoral letter is the bishop’s prerogative, an opportunity to speak over his priests’ heads directly to the faithful. Now the association—representing barely 130 of the diocese’s 2,500 priests—issued its own pastoral letter. The authors called it a “public criticism of the stance of the Church in Boston … an indictment not so much of individuals as of a theology and culture which, in our view, impede the preaching and living of the gospel.” It concluded with eighteen recommendations to the Cardinal, among them a “substantially increased commitment of money and personnel for the urban ministry” and training of priests to make them “more sensitive to social responsibilities.”
When the association submitted its letter to Cushing, he raised no objection; but, after its publication, he steadfastly refused to discuss the recommendations. Old and desperately ill by then, the Cardinal was either unwilling or unable to bring his enormous prestige to bear on the city’s intensifying racial crisis. Many believed that the Church was the one institution which might have halted Boston’s lurch toward race war, but by 1969 it was probably too late for that.
There is evidence that, before he died, the Cardinal had misgivings about his stance in this area. In August 1970, he met briefly with State Education Commissioner Neil Sullivan. The Cardinal acknowledged to Sullivan that many Boston Catholics “carried with them deep feelings of prejudice and distrust toward black people, and they trusted to too great an extent the leadership of bigoted and narrow-minded parish priests.” According to Sullivan, Cushing was filled with remorse because he had done so little to change those attitudes.
Cushing’s final years were troubled ones in almost every respect. Evidence of his deteriorating hold on the Archdiocese came in early 1966 when students at St. John’s Seminary began agitating against its “dusty medievalism.” Impatient with the spartan regime of their new rector, Lawrence Riley, the seminarians sought freedom to engage in ecumenical discussions, to take courses at secular universities, to express “reasoned opinions” in public, “in short, to be men of the sixties.” When Riley refused to bend, 125 of the seminary’s 375 students took a step which would have been unthinkable only a few years before: as the Cardinal addressed a group of pastors in the seminary library, they stood in silent vigil outside, demanding reform. The Cardinal met with student representatives, then promptly expelled the eight “ringleaders.” But when other students went on a hunger strike, supported by hundreds of lay Catholics who picketed the Cardinal’s residence all through Holy Week, Cushing partially backed down, dismissing Monsignor Riley and replacing him with a more flexible rector.
In July 1968, Pope Paul VI stunned much of the Catholic world with Humanae Vitae, his long-awaited encyclical on birth control. Ignoring a papal commission’s recommendation for relaxation of the Church’s stand, Paul reiterated the traditional position against all artificial contraception. That placed Cushing in a difficult position. Once a hard-liner himself—in 1948 he had blocked efforts to reform the state statute on contraception—Cushing had quietly modified his position. He maintained a surprising friendship with Dr. John Rock, a Catholic by birth, often known as “the Father of the Pill.” When Rome denounced Rock, Cushing chortled, “My God, Johnny, you’ve got the whole Vatican pregnant!” At first, the Cardinal himself seemed to temporize on Humanae Vitae. His initial statement—“Rome has spoken. The matter is settled for now”—brought a stinging note from the Apostolic Delegate: “What do you mean, ‘for now’?” But when the encyclical aroused a storm of protest among Catholics—including a statement by seven Boston theologians denouncing it as “neither biblical, theological, nor truly historical”—he retreated to orthodoxy, disciplining some of the rebels.
That was nothing compared to the furor the Cardinal stirred up that fall by condoning Jackie Kennedy’s marriage to Aristotle Onassis. The Vatican held that by marrying a divorced man, the President’s widow had “knowingly violated the law of the Church” and was ineligible to receive the sacraments. But Cushing staunchly defended her: “What a lot of nonsense! Only God knows who is a sinner and who is not. Why can’t she marry whomever she wants?” That brought him an avalanche of abusive mail, apparently reflecting the covert resentment many Boston Catholics felt for the privileged Kennedys. In a moment of intense depression, Cushing talked of resigning. “If they don’t understand me after thirty years,” he said, “they’ll never understand me.”
He had long yearned to retire and devote his remaining years to missionary work in Latin America, but Pope Paul insisted that he clear up his crushing financial deficit before leaving office. Obediently, Cushing launched a Jubilee Fund to raise $50 million, almost three-fifths of the deficit, but even with the help of professional fund raisers, it collected only $28 million. Proud of his ability to wring “dollars out of Plymouth Rock,” Cushing was devastated.
By 1969, the diseases which had gnawed at him for years—asthma, emphysema, bleeding ulcers, cancer of the prostate and kidneys—were taking a terrible toll. Gaunt, almost emaciated, he began drinking heavily to dull the pain. In his cups, he could be mawkishly self-pitying and abusive to priests (when a troubled young curate tried to consult him, Cushing snapped, “You don’t have enough brains to lose your faith! Go back to your parish!”). Yet he still gave off flashes of the old “Cush”: throwing out the first ball at Fenway Park; dancing a jig in an old folks’ home on Thanksgiving Day; reciting “The Face on the Barroom Floor” to an ancient recluse; hot-dogging at communion breakfasts; stri
ding across the room to stick out a big paw and bellow, “My name’s Cushing—what’s yours?”; riding the roller coaster at Revere Beach or the bumper cars at Nantasket as a covey of nuns, their habits flapping in the wind, giggled in delight at their antic Archbishop; trying on an endless assortment of hats—football helmets and yarmulkes, fireman’s hats and straw boaters, baseball caps and Easter bonnets—symbols of his pragmatic, chameleon-like adaptation to a changing world.
But now his retirement was set—to coincide with his seventy-fifth birthday in August 1970—and speculation began to focus on his successor. Many names were mentioned—among them Bishop Bernard Flanagan of Worcester and Daniel Cronin, one of Boston’s auxiliary bishops. The popular favorite was probably John Cardinal Wright. As prefect of the Congregation for the Clergy, Wright was the highest-ranking American in the Vatican, an intellectual known both for his progressive social stands and for his increasing theological conservatism. A former secretary to both O’Connell and Cushing, Wright had hoped to succeed his old mentors in Boston, but relations had rarely been smooth between Wright and Cushing (when told Wright had his eye on the episcopal throne, Cushing growled, “He may have his eye on it, but I’ve got my ass on it”). And Wright suffered from another major liability: among insiders he was believed to be a homosexual, a trait tolerated in cosmopolitan Rome, but a severe handicap in puritanical Boston.
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