Real Lace

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  Father Diman once told Time magazine: “Religion as a living force in deepening and enriching personality has been almost eliminated from the public schools, and with it the most powerful instrument for the development of character.… The greatest disappointment of my school career has been that my schools are ‘expensive schools.’ I have never ceased to hope that they might become schools for the rank and file.” The First Irish Families, however, were quite satisfied with not having their sons schooled with the rank and file.

  After Portsmouth Priory, a proper Catholic boy was “supposed” to go to Georgetown University in Washington, run by the Jesuits. Of all the Catholic colleges, Georgetown ranks the highest, socially. It has often been said that an Irish Catholic father, who may have gone to a socially inferior college like Fordham, Holy Cross, or Notre Dame, looks forward to having his sons accepted at Georgetown. Fordham and the others are regarded as colleges for “lace curtain Irish,” just one step above “shanty Irish.” Georgetown is the college for “real lace,” or, as it has been called, “reembroidered lace.” Members of the Windham Mountain Club have said that one reason for the club’s congeniality is the fact that so many of the members are Georgetown alumni. The principal benefactors of Georgetown, like those of Portsmouth Priory, include all the members of the F.I.F.’s.

  In the Murray family, with Uncle Tom as its spiritual head, there was always a crisis when a son wanted to go to a college other than Georgetown, or to a college in the Ivy League. When young Jake Murray wanted to go to Yale, Uncle Tom was seriously upset and inveighed against the young man’s choice. “It’s canon law that he should get a Catholic education!” he insisted. “Encyclical Number 6,978. Canon law!” Jake, however, finally won, and went to Yale. This branch of the family—the Jack Murrays—were, in Uncle Tom’s opinion, heading for damnation, what with Jake Murray’s sister Jeanne having married a divorced Vanderbilt. The Cuddihys were more liberal, and the children were always aware that Harvard, Yale, and Princeton were academically better than the Catholic colleges. And yet, when the time came, Catholic colleges were chosen for them. Tom Cuddihy had done extremely well at Portsmouth, and had been accepted at Harvard, but his father still had misgivings. Late in the summer before he was to enter Harvard, his father invited two priests to dinner, Father Gerald Phelan, head of the Pontifical Institute of the University of Toronto, and a Monsignor Hartigan, and Mr. Cuddihy asked these men what they thought of Tom’s Harvard plans. Both priests said, “No—don’t send him there. Send him to St. Michael’s College in Toronto.” Not even Georgetown would do. And so Tom Cuddihy was shipped off to Toronto. He stayed two days before running away—to enter Harvard.

  As for girls, the right schools were those operated by nuns of the Order of the Sacred Heart. If a Catholic girl of good family decided to become a nun herself, the most fashionable order was Sacred Heart. In every city, the Sacred Heart school is usually considered the “snob” Catholic school, and in many ways it is. Sacred Heart nuns are rather special people. Unlike the nuns in ordinary parochial schools, for example, who hide their original identity under the veil of saints’ names—Sister Joseph, Sister Theresa, Sister Ignatius—Sacred Heart nuns are permitted to keep their own names, as Mother Byrnes, Mother O’Malley, or Mother Shea, and they often come from the wealthiest Catholic families in town. They are also allowed to dine out in mufti, and to go to cocktail parties. Their schools, in addition to academic subjects, teach upper-class values, morals, and manners.

  The Sacred Heart girl is taught how to hold a fork, how to pierce the breast of a chicken Kiev with the tip of a knife, how to fold a napkin, how to speak to servants, how to sit and how to rise from a chair, how to turn the dinner conversation at the conclusion of a course, and how to curtsy. She is taught, in other words, how to be an elegant lady, a gracious hostess, and a proper guest. French is stressed because French is the second language that every well-bred English-speaking girl should have, and when Reverend Mother enters the classroom at a Sacred Heart school, she is greeted with a chorus of “Bonjour, Réverende Mère,” to which she responds, “Bonjour, mes enfants,” and then, “Au nom du Père, et du Fils, et du Saint-Esprit. Ainsi soit-il.” Sacred Heart girl sometimes argue with the nuns about certain of the rules of behavior, but the nuns, who are usually gently bred ladies themselves, will argue pleasantly back, explaining what it means to be a Sacred Heart girl. A Sacred Heart girl should sit erect, with her knees together and her feet flat on the floor, or else crossed gracefully at the ankles—never with knees crossed. When asked what is wrong with knee-crossing, the Sacred Heart nun will reply, “My dear, there is nothing wrong with it. It is just something that a Sacred Heart girl does not do.”

  To her pupils, the Reverend Mother reads this doctrine:

  The child of the Sacred Heart understands that her role is central to the design of creation. If she is not among those few called to the perfect life of religion, it will be her task to guide the souls of her own children. Her special influence depends upon her distinctively feminine qualities: tact, quiet courage, and the willingness to subordinate her will to another’s gracefully and even gaily. Filled with the tranquility of inner certitude, she does not disperse her energies in pointless curiosity, in capricious espousal of new theories, in the spirit of contention. Long years of silence, of attention to manners and forms, have instilled in her that self-control without which order and beauty are impossible. Her bearing is the outward shape of that perfect purity which is her greatest beauty, and which models itself on the ideal womanhood found in the Mother of God. She who can bear the small trials of daily discipline will not falter at those crises in life which require firmness and fortitude.

  The child of the Sacred Heart frequently emerges from her education with the inner certainty that she is a distinctly special and superior person. In New York, the Murray, McDonnell, and Cuddihy girls went to the Convent of the Sacred Heart, which was originally at the fashionable address of Fifty-fourth Street and Madison Avenue, and later moved to an even more fashionable location at Ninety-first Street and Fifth Avenue, where the school occupied the Italian Renaissance mansion originally built by Otto H. Kahn. (Kahn, the Jewish philanthropist and banker, toyed with Catholicism in his later years, though he never converted, and this is how his house came to become the property of the order, and to be humorously called “The Otto H. Kahn-vent”) There are some New York parents who do not think that the New York convent is quite what it used to be academically—Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis withdrew Caroline Kennedy from the convent several years ago and enrolled her in the nonsectarian Brearley School—and yet it remains the “best” Catholic school for New York girls.

  After her secondary schooling, the real Sacred Heart girl goes either to Barat, in Lake Forest, Illinois, or to Manhattanville, in Purchase, New York, both fashionable addresses. Oddly enough, a third Catholic college, Marymount—even though it is more or less right in the family, with James Butler as its chief benefactor, and his cousin, Mother Butler, as its many-years Mother Superior—is rated socially below the other two. “Perhaps,” says Mary Jane Cuddihy MacGuire, who married James Butler’s grandson and who went to Manhattanville, “it was because we didn’t think that Marymount was academically as good as Manhattanville. But I do know that we considered the Marymount girls—well, ‘not much.’”

  Chapter 22

  ROYALTY

  Once, one of Uncle Tom Murray’s nephews, irked at his uncle’s proprietary manner—in matters of faith, education, marriage, the spending of money, to name just a few areas of family life over which Uncle Tom assumed authority and had strong opinions—muttered to a friend, “I’m going to spread rumors about him that will get him kicked out of the Knights of Malta and the Knights of St. Gregory. In fact, I’ll make it so bad that he won’t even be able to get into the Knights of Columbus!”

  The point is, of course, that belonging to the Knights of Columbus carries with it about as much social prestige as joining the Rotary Club or the O
ddfellows. There are any number of Rotary-style Church organizations. There are others that carry genuine prestige, memberships to which are not given out lightly by the Vatican, including the Knights of St. Gregory, the Grand Knights of the Holy Sepulchre, and the Knights of the Grand Cross. But to be chosen for the Papal order of the Knights of Malta is the highest Catholic honor of all. Those Irish elected to it can consider themselves true “Irishtocracy,” or, as they have also been labeled, “silk curtain Irish.” Both Uncle Tom and his father were Knights of Malta, and the Duchess Brady was a Dame. The Knights of Malta comprise what is perhaps the most exclusive club on earth. They are more than the Catholic aristocracy; they are the nobility, royalty. Of the more than six hundred million Roman Catholics in the world, only eight thousand are Knights of Malta or, to use the full title, the Sovereign and Military Order of the Knights Hospitaller of St. John of Jerusalem of Rhodes and of Malta. Their list stands next in importance only to the Calendar of Saints. While the Knights of Columbus are associated with lodge meetings and bingo, the Knights of Malta can pick up a telephone and chat with the Pope.

  The organization was founded in the eleventh century as an order of nursing monks, and, for over nine hundred years, the order has striven to preserve at least a certain amount of the grandeur and elegant trappings of ancient aristocracy. Ever since the Knights captured the island of Rhodes from the Byzantine Empire in 1309, the Holy See has recognized the “sovereign” character of the order, a designation that permits it to have an unusual degree of independence from local officials of the Church. At the Knights’ headquarters on the Via Condotti in Rome, the Knights’ scarlet-and-white banner flies over a huge palazzo which the Italian police regard as having extraterritorial rights—a nation of its own, like Vatican’ City—and some thirty-five foreign nations maintain full diplomatic relations with the order.

  Over the centuries, countless Catholic kings and queens have been Knights and Dames of Malta. Today, the membership of the Knights is something of an amalgam of ancient European nobility and newly rich North and South Americans. Among the most prominent members are King Baudouin of Belgium and Henri d’Orléans, Pretender to the throne of France, along with Irishman J. Peter Grace, the Honorable John D. J. Moore, United States Ambassador to Ireland, and Danny Thomas, the entertainer, who, in 1940, discouraged about the state of his career, began praying to St. Jude, the patron saint of the lost and hopeless, promising to build a shrine to the saint if he got a job. He got one within days, and later built the two-million-dollar St. Jude Children’s hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, as his end of the bargain.

  For years the Knights of Malta maintained a semisecrecy about their membership and activities, displaying a lordly disdain of publicity, rarely permitting photographs of their annual meetings when the Knights put on hats festooned with ostrich plumes, golden spurs, uniforms with gold epaulets, sashes, ribbons, medals, and decorations. This attitude also kept the Knights somewhat at arm’s length from the hierarchy of the Church, even though, in the United States, the Knights became well known to the hierarchy through their fund-raising activities. The Knights kept their sights focused firmly on the order’s ancient military past. After Suleiman the Magnificent and his Turkish fleet drove the Knights from Rhodes in 1522, the Knights took over the island of Malta and fended off, almost singlehandedly, the advance of Islam into Christian Europe. But the Reformation and the rise of European nationalism eventually stripped the order of its temporal power, and the Papacy was more or less forced to take its bold defenders back under the shelter of its wing. “Rhodes formed the character of our order,” its Grand Chancellor, Quintin Jermy Gwyn, has said, “but Malta was its splendor. It was a glorious period.” Still, that was all a very long time ago.

  Today, the Knights of Malta may appear to be something of an anachronism, a bit of ancient tradition and ritual that survives in history-conscious Rome, and the advantages of being a Knight may seem no more substantial than whatever can be got from the opportunity of rubbing shoulders with Cardinals (New York’s Terence Cardinal Cooke and the late Richard Cardinal Cushing of Boston). And so, despite the eminence and affluence of the organization, the Knights decided several years ago that they—and their good works—needed more exposure, lest the Knights be regarded as no more important than “kings” and “queens” dressed up for Mardi Gras.

  Thereupon the Knights of Malta called the first press conference in their nine-hundred-year history, in order to bring to the attention of the public the nature of their world-wide ministry to the poor and ailing. Next, they went so far as to engage the Italian motion picture director, Vittorio De Sica, to film a television documentary on the Knights’ good works. “This film can help our fund-raising,” Grand Chancellor Gwyn explained. “What we need are more supporters willing to give their money, brains, and time.”

  De Sica and his producer, Peter Dragadze, went to London to film British nobles of the order doing menial work, even emptying bedpans in St. John’s Hospital, and from there flew to Belfast to follow the Knights’ ambulance unit as it tended casualties of Northern Ireland’s riots. Providing such medical assistance is still the Knights’ main activity. In Germany, the Knights sponsor a nationwide ambulance corps with 24,000 aristocratic and unpaid volunteers, and in South Vietnam, throughout the war, they administered a team of fifty-two doctors. Although many of the Knights and Dames of the order are elderly and infirm, they are all expected to lend a personal hand in the operation of the 150 hospitals and other medical services the order maintains. “When you put a rich man to work for five days in an ambulance, it transforms him,” says Count Wolfgang von Bellestrem, the German jurist who oversees the order’s medical work, succinctly expressing the order’s feelings of noblesse oblige.

  Even Vittorio De Sica, who had not expected to be, was impressed. “I had thought of it as a purely social group of nobles in uniforms, with ceremonies and lots of pomp,” he said at the time. But, after observing the noble gentlemen at work with lepers, earthquake victims, and mentally retarded children, he changed his mind. “They are doing real works of charity,” he said, “Christian charity.”

  In the United States, meanwhile, the First Irish Families are often criticized for limiting their philanthropy to the Catholic Church, Church-connected projects, and the Democratic Party. It is true that, when it comes to charity, Catholics have tended to favor Catholic charities, just as Jews have lent their main support to Jewish philanthropies with a “Let’s take care of our own first” philosophy. And, just as the Zionist cause was not a “fashionable” one among upper-class American Jews, the Irish cause at the time of the “trouble” was not popular among the F.I.F.’s, who did little to support it. President Eamon de Valera’s comment that such money as had come from the United States to support the Irish Revolution came from housemaids and laborers was not entirely an exaggeration. Grandpa R. J. Cuddihy was one of the few wealthy New Yorkers who gave money to the Irish cause, but when his mother found out about it, she was furious.

  There are certain Catholic charities that are more fashionable than others. In New York, in addition to the Foundling Hospital, families like the Murrays, McDonnells, and Cuddihys have helped make the Catholic Big Sisters more or less the Catholic answer to the Junior League. The Big Sisters counsel and place in foster homes young girls in trouble with their families or referred to them by Family Court. Then there is the Guild of the Infant Saviour, founded in 1901 to “give sanctuary to the destitute young girl, friendless, alone, and facing motherhood.” At one point, the Guild had among its fourteen directors Mr. Robert J. Cuddihy; his daughter-in-law, Mrs. H. Lester Cuddihy; her sister, Mrs. J. Ennis McQuail; and Mrs. Cuddihy’s daughter’s aunt-in-law, Mrs. Walter E. Travers, the former Genevieve Butler. Another “social” Catholic charity that is equally inbred is St. Vincent’s Hospital. For a 1959 benefit fashion show on behalf of the Cardinal Spellman Wing of St. Vincent’s Hospital in Westchester, the seven models—all size ten—were Mary Jane Cuddihy MacGuire; her
daughter, Judith Ann; her sister, Anne Marie Cuddihy; their mother, Mrs. H. Lester Cuddihy; and three cousins, Mrs. Basil Harris, Mrs. Thomas Sheridan, and Mrs. Murray Roche. Just as chic—and just as full of the same people as its leading benefactors—is the Catholic Center for the Blind. All these organizations, the F.I.F.’s are quick to point out, may be Catholic-sponsored, but they serve all creeds.

  Just as there are fashionable charities, there are also fashionable churches. One might suppose that the “Power House,” St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue, would be one of these, but it is not. St. Patrick’s is regarded as “lace curtain,” and for tourists. Most of the First Families worship at St. Thomas More, St. Ignatius Loyola, or at St. Jean Baptiste, “the Thomas Fortune Ryan church.” “The reason for this is mostly geographic, not snobbish,” says one of the Murrays. “They’re located more convenient to where we live”—on the Upper East Side, on or off Park Avenue. Still, as a result of their addresses (and because they are smaller, more elegant and restrained in their decor), these three have become known as New York’s “snob churches” among other Catholics. One, indeed, has been humorously christened “Our Lady of the Cadillac.”