Spellman and Sheen: Anticommunists as Public Men

American Catholics have always had a minority status. Throughout most of the nation’s history, they were a relatively quiet minority, professing their loyalty to the United States in order to show that they were not, as many non-Catholic Americans feared, agents of the Roman hierarchy. Few public figures were Catholic and, of these, very few made a point of their Catholicism. In addition, few members of the Church hierarchy became true public figures well known to the society at large. In the Cold War, the meeting of Catholic and “American” anticommunism saw Catholics playing a more visible public role. During this period, two members of the hierarchy, Francis Cardinal Spellman and Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, became prominent public persons. Both Spellman and Sheen made anticommunism a primary thrust of their message.

The paths taken by Spellman and Sheen often crossed. As New York’s Cardinal, Spellman was Sheen’s superior and they appeared together on many anticommunist stages. Yet the contrast between the two men was great. Spellman, as head of the Catholics in the largest city in the country, was a power-broker.[1] He was Military Vicar of the Armed Forces, an acquaintance of world leaders, a global traveler, and a master builder. Sheen, on the other hand, had risen to fame through his radio and TV programs, thus making him perhaps the first modern American Catholic, and certainly the most widely-known American Catholic of his era.

Francis Spellman was born outside Boston in 1889. He graduated from Fordham University in 1911 and later attended the North American College in Rome. In Rome, he cultivated friendships with high Church officials that would serve him throughout his career. Back in Boston, Spellman worked as an editorial writer for The Pilot. He then returned to Rome in 1925, and was assigned by Pope Pius XI to serve as an assistant to Cardinal Gaspari, the papal Secretary of State. This appointment made Spellman the first American to become a member of the Roman bureaucracy and thus assured him of an important role in Church affairs. He was appointed Monsignor in 1926 with the rank of papal Chamberlain. At the Vatican, he became as associate of the new Secretary of State, Cardinal Pacelli, later Pope Pius XII. Spellman returned to Boston as Auxiliary Bishop, but this minor position was not to be the end for him. In March 1939, Pope Pius XII was elected. Six weeks later, upon the death of Cardinal Hayes, Spellman was appointed Archbishop of New York. In December 1939, he became Military Vicar of the Armed Forces, a post out of which Spellman literally got tremendous mileage.[2]

As Military Vicar, Spellman had a forum for the constant pronouncements on politics and world affairs that would mark his career. Behind many of his opinions was a blatant nationalism that often erased the boundaries between Church and State. For example, on December 7, 1941, Spellman issued a statement placing all of the New York Archdiocese’s “resources, hospitals, institutions, and personnel at the disposition of the government.” “As an American,” Spellman went on, “and one of twenty-five million Catholic Americans, I follow the identically glorious tradition of country and my religion.”[3]

Spellman travelled widely during World War II, visiting troops, generals, ambassadors, and other officials, thus making himself a conspicuous supporter of the Allied cause. He also served as unofficial courier for President Roosevelt, carrying messages to heads of state, as well as to the Vatican. A week after American troops breached the Siegfried Line, Spellman was in Germany saying Mass for the troops.[4] The war years moved Spellman to write several inspirational books on the subject, including The Risen Soldier (MacMillan, 1944).

Although Spellman’s patriotism was hardly at issue, he felt compelled to defend it once in 1957. When asked to comment on the testimony of an FBI counterspy that there was a plan to put a Russian spy in his office, Spellman replied: “I never had any doubt about the loyalty of all my associates, and the Soviets do not need to put any spies in my office to find out that I am completely dedicated to the service of my country and my fellow man.”[5]

Spellman’s elevation to Cardinal in 1946 coincided with the onset of the Cold War and his own crusade against Communism. In a 1947 article, he wrote:

My sole objective in writing this article is to help save America from the godless governing of totalitarianism, for I believe that every “ism” based on bloodshed, barbarism, suppression and slavery is un-American. I believe that every real American, if he but knew the truth, would strive to defend this nation from Communists who, wielding their weapons of intrigue and infamy, are imposing on our country their profane pattern of serfdom.[6]

Spellman wrote that Communism was growing by spreading the “seeds of confusion and disunion.” One of the Communists’ methods was to “revile and defile” anyone with opposing views.[7] In this, the Communists and the Catholic right had much in common.

The theme of this particular article was the nexus between patriotism and anticommunism. Spellman recounted tales of bravery and faith among U.S. troops in World War II, many of which, of course, he had witnessed personally. The evils of the war were now supplanted by the evils of Communism. To make his point, Spellman asked a rhetorical question of a mythical war widow:

Could you, whose husband’s broken body lies buried amongst the ruins in another nation’s soil,  look into the image of his sad eyes and honestly answer the question mirrored there: “Yes, Tom, America is freed forever from the bondage of the totalitarian tyranny you died to destroy”?[8]

Spellman’s answer to his question to the widow was, apparently, “no.” Communists were trying to convert Americans to communism by infiltrating labor unions, government, industry, schools, and even the armed forces. At the same time, party members were using radio, films, and the press to “divide us against ourselves.”[9] Spellman closed with a theme that was a familiar one to the Catholic right. America had to maintain its vigilance against this internal threat because civilizations decay from within, when the people cease following the proper religious and philosophical paths.

Spellman apparently did more than write about the evils of communism in the post-World War II years. According to Freedom of Information Act documents made available to John Cooney in his book The American Pope, Spellman agreed to help the FBI “ferret out and eliminate the Communists and fellow travelers who are in positions of control in labor unions.” During the Italian election campaign of 1947-48, Spellman helped funnel some of the $350 million of government and private funds reaching Italy to the Vatican to help Christian Democratic candidates. He even asked Secretary of State George Marshall to reimburse the Vatican for Church funds spent on the election. The Vatican was reimbursed.[10]

God and country was a tune played again and again by Spellman in the following years. At a Holy Rome Society service attended by 45,000 people at the Polo Grounds in New York, Spellman saw “atheistic communism as an enemy of all men who believe in God and America.”[11] At a Catholic Charities meeting in New Orleans, Spellman said that Americans had a choice, which as presented by the Cardinal, certainly allowed for no viable alternative:

Communism is an enemy of all men who believe in God and in America. Each of us has a choice to make — unity and a world wherein our children shall learn in liberty to live in the love of God and neighbor, or disunity in a land where our children shall live in godless serfdom — in a world enslaved. Which shall it be?[12]

The Catholic News, the newspaper of the Diocese of New York, expectedly covered the Cardinal’s activities and statements in great detail. Most of the coverage, however, was about Spellman’s travels and his dedications of schools, convents, and churches (Spellman’s pro-building philosophy rivaled his anticommunism as the driving force of his life).  The Catholic News gave page one coverage to a speech given by the Cardinal to the Friendly Sons of Saint Patrick. In this speech, the Cardinal maintained that American was no safer from Communist domination than European countries. In Europe, according to Spellman, “we witnessed the killing and enslavement of whole peoples by Communists who, with the shedding of blood, become as if drunken with it.”

The United States was largely responsible for doing little to stop communism, according to the Cardinal. Rome burned and the world fiddled. “The strings of the fiddle,” Spellman said, “are committees, conferences, conversations, appeasements — to the tune of NO ACTION TODAY!” One solution to the problem, the Cardinal suggested, was “universal military training.” This rather un-Christlike approach to the threat of communism became a central part of the Cardinal’s litany throughout the Cold War.

The Military Vicar

As Military Vicar of the Armed Forces, Spellman went beyond attending to the spiritual needs of the troops. He assumed a militaristic posture that combined his anticommunism with a sentimental, if not maudlin, view of the U.S. armed forces and the American way of life. A speech he gave at a baseball writers’ dinner cannot be summarized with justice to his rhetoric. After first creating an image of soldiers with guns on their backs coming over a hill in Korea, Spellman went on:

Silhouetted in the dusk of evening, they looked like boys coming home from a ball field with bats resting on their shoulders. They might have been coming over a swell of land in Iowa; they might have been coming over a rise of ground in Texas; they might have been coming over a hill in New England; but it was all too clear that they were coming down a slope in Korea after having played a game with death. It was in such weird and unusual circumstances that the function of baseball in our national life came into sharper perspective, for there is a valid and true correlation between Korea and baseball. Ultimately both are concerned with the same reality, the virtue of gesture. In ordinary conversation this virtue is often labeled “fair play,” for “fair play” is the American way of saying that every man be given his rights.[13]

In a speech to the American Legion in September 1954, Spellman specifically rejected peaceful coexistence with the Soviets, although he left unsaid what he thought the alternative should be. According to the Cardinal, the danger of another Pearl Harbor affecting the “whole American people” was “definitely possible and possibly imminent.” Spellman continued:

How can there be peaceful coexistence between two parties if one of them is continually clawing at the throat of the other? How does one peacefully coexist with men who mouth words of peace while waging treacherous war? A sentence of death has been passed upon us by the very power with whom we have been asked peacefully to coexist. We need to remember as we have never remembered before, how fatal the temptation to place any trust in those evil leaders who have risen to their world position by reason of lies, duplicity, and treason.[14]

The Catholic News of August 7, 1954 featured a page one photo of the Cardinal with South Korean president Syngman Rhee. The lead headline was “Battle on Communism Duty of All Citizens His Eminence Warns.” The story covered a speech given to the Veterans of Foreign Wars in which Spellman recalled his visits to U.S. troops all over the world and how he had been encouraged by their “faith in God and in America.” Not surprisingly, the speech was given an approving treatment in the newspaper’s editorial.[15]

The Cardinal often delivered his message of militant anticommunism to the receptive ears of veterans’ groups. For example, in 1953, Spellman was given an award by the American Legion Post on Governor’s Island (NY). A large selection of military brass was on hand as the Cardinal reviewed a marching drill of the Fordham ROTC. In his speech to the group, Spellman said that teachers belonging to the American Legion would never be afraid to take a loyalty oath. The Legion’s members were not, Spellman concluded, “moles who cannot see nor ostriches who do not wish to see” the threat of Communism to the U.S. and to Christianity.[16]

Spellman made Christmas trips to Korea and other military outposts for many years. These trips provided the Cardinal with many opportunities to express his belief in the need for a military solution to the threat of Communism. On other occasions, the Cardinal used his military “experience” to make his point. In his 1951 Easter message, Spellman said that “Godliness” was America’s strongest weapon, but troops were needed, too. With regard to U.S. forces in Korea, he said:

America needs loyal sons today. She needs them strong of body and soul. And on this Easter Day I pray God that our nation may awaken while still there may be time, lest atheistic Communism, fierce and fiendish, destroy America, the fairest enterprise of man.[17]

Spellman’s admiration for the military and its trappings led to enduring images of his blessing bombs and warships. It also led him to consider Douglas MacArthur to be the greatest living American.[18]  When asked his opinion about Senator Joseph McCarthy in 1953, Spellman relied on a military answer: “He was a Marine, and having been with the Marines myself, the fact that a man was a Marine places him very high in my book as regards patriotism.”[19]

Spellman obviously considered himself a spokesman for the U.S. abroad. In addition to his visits to the armed forces overseas and to world leaders, he defended U.S. positions whenever possible. For example, in October of 1953 he addressed the Grande Conferences Catholiques in Brussels. The audience of 4,000, including the entire Belgian cabinet, heard the Cardinal attack European critics of the U.S.

The thrust of Spellman’s speech was that Europeans had criticized the United States for being “grossly militaristic” and “vulgar.” Was the U.S. really so bad? First, with a personal plug and then with praise for his country, the Cardinal responded:

I do not think so and I will tell you why. Within the last decade I have visited every part of the globe and have thrice circled the earth! I trudged with soldiers over the battlefields of Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and the Far East. I entered Belgium with the troops of liberation and my heart beat faster at the sincerity and warmth of the welcome which the Belgian people gave to us…

That America responded as she did is not due to any desire on her part to satisfy imperialistic ambitions, nor is it inspired by a homely desire to export what is called “The American Way of Life.” America’s generosity, her desire to share her substance with those less fortunate, springs from a deep evangelical motive.[20]

Spellman had harsh words for those Europeans who applied the term “McCarthyism” to investigations of Communism in the U.S.,

The anguished cries and protests against “McCarthyism” are not going to dissuade Americans from their desire to see Communists exposed and removed from positions where they can carry out their nefarious plans. If American prestige is going to suffer in Europe because of this understandable desire we have to keep our free society immune from Communist subversion, then it seems more a reflection upon European standards of honor and patriotism than on ours.[21]

It is somewhat ironic that in his Brussels speech, the Cardinal had come very close to doing what he had accused the Communists of doing — vilifying those who held dissenting opinions.

Iron Curtain Catholics

As a political activist, Spellman had a great deal to say about the mistreatment of Catholics abroad, especially of those in the “Iron Curtain” nations of Eastern Europe. The Voice of America broadcast the Cardinal’s Easter 1950 message throughout Eastern Europe. Spellman spoke from “free America, proclaiming and symbolizing her blessings to all the world.” He encouraged the people to continue to hope and to take pride in their resistance, even in the “hour when the voice of God is silenced in your churches, your schools closed and your press muzzled, your prelates, priests, Brothers and nuns jailed or exiled, your bloodied brows remain unbowed.”

Spellman did not hold back in his condemnation of the Communists responsible for this situation:

Godless, lawless forces, inhumane and unhuman, now oppress you, robbing you of your God-given rights. These monsters have one consuming hate — they hate our God and yours, and they hate you because you are made to the image of God. They seek not only to destroy your faith in God, they seek also to destroy you because you love God. But, by their evil works they have doomed themselves before the God whom they now mock, and in their blindness they will first fall into the very pit which they themselves have dug for humanity’s grave![22]

Archbishop Aloysius Stepinac was imprisoned by the Yugoslavian government shortly after World War II for his opposition to the Tito regime. At the World Peace Rally in New York in 1946, Spellman attacked Stalin,

Whose treacherous trademark of Communism is stamped upon his Yugoslav puppet, who, following the perfidious pattern of Communist godlessness, barbarism, and enslavement, has already sealed the doom of this noble, humane priest as he is subjected to the agonies of a prolonged lynching.[23]

In 1948, Spellman was able to combine his anticommunism with his zeal for building when he attended the dedication of Archbishop Stepinac High School in White Plains, New York. On this occasion, Monsignor Fulton Sheen joined Cardinal Spellman. Sheen compared Stepinac with Christ as a martyr for righteousness, while Spellman praised the parishioners who contributed the money to build the school and the various building trades who constructed it.[24]

The plaque at the entrance to the school read:

Stepinac was sentenced to sixteen years in prison but after five years was confined to his native village. He died in 1960.

Of all the Catholic priests imprisoned by Communists abroad, no one received more of Spellman’s attention than Josef Cardinal Mindszenty, Primate of Hungary. Mindszenty, jailed by the Hungarian government for alleged crimes against the regime, was the subject of a rare sermon from the pulpit of St. Patrick’s in early 1948 (the last such sermon was on VE Day four years earlier). On a day when 4,000 Catholic boy scouts paraded along Fifth Avenue in support of Mindszenty, Spellman announced the birth of a “new god,” born of earth and blood. This god “strides ahead and under the thunder of his steps the globe trembles from East to West. This is the red god.” These “blasphemous” words were those of a Hungarian Communist, a “Satan-bred man,” and could well foretell the doom of America and the world, according to Cardinal Spellman.[26]

Spellman was convinced that Mindszenty’s trial was a foregone conclusion and that his life was doomed. The former was probably the case, but Mindszenty was not executed. In fact he lived under asylum in the U.S. embassy in Budapest until 1971. Spellman, therefore, used the sermon as a tirade against Communism and as a call for stopping Communism in the United States:

I avow that under the whole American people, without further ostrich-like actions and pretenses unite to stop the Communist floodings of our own land, our sons, for the third and last time, shall be summoned from the comforts, tranquility, and love of their own homes and families to bear arms against those who would desecrate and destroy them. Yes, it is full time that a strong and vigilant America unite in prayer and protest against wasting the youth of her own nation, and try to help save civilization from the world’s most fiendish, ghoulish men of slaughter, lest the anguished spending of a million lives will end again in war’s beginning![27]

Spellman’s hyperbole in this sermon served two purposes. First, he spoke as if Mindszenty was dead. Thus “we should not grieve at the death of Cardinal Mindszenty, for man is not completely born until he dies to live in God.” Second, Americans had to endure “insults and wounds” upon their honor and decency while the “fiendish Communists” are allowed to “drug” them with “their propaganda and our own apathy.”[28]

This sermon provides a good summary of Spellman’s thought on the subject of Communism. It had all the necessary elements: an innocent martyr, a vision of doom, and a call to U.S. patriotism. The sermon also had another element that distinguished Spellman from some other Catholic anticommunists such as Fulton Sheen. Spellman’s sermon was a totally emotional appeal, devoid of intellectual context. This was a sermon about Satan, Baal, fiends, ghouls, martyrs, and Mindszenty’s suffering 85-year-old mother. This approach was consistent with Spellman’s utterances during his entire career. For example, ten years later, upon Nikita Krushchev’s 1959 visit to New York, Spellman announced personally from the pulpit of St. Patrick’s a holy hour of prayer for the country and its leaders:

Once again the fateful hour approaches, dark with formidable forebodings of disasters that yet may come, reflecting and compounding appalling evils and errors of the past…

From the sacrifices of our cherished sons I learned the inestimable value of the prize and value of freedom…

I beg each and every person to pray to God that in His might and mercy He will continue to bless our country in this crucial hour. He will strengthen America’s leaders to inspire the leaders of other nations with a profound understanding and an undeviating appreciation of the everlasting value and unchanging principle of true freedom.[29]

The Authoritarian Cardinal: The Cemetery Workers Strike

While a champion of “freedom” in the abstract and of the freedom of those in Communist countries, Spellman’s attitude toward freedom closer to home was another matter. This was especially true when the freedom of a group of cemetery workers to choose their own union was at issue.

What happened, in brief, was that in January 1949 Local 293 of the Cemetery Workers Union struck the cemeteries of the diocese after the Cemetery Director, Monsignor George C. Ehart rejected the workers’ demand for higher wages. The local was affiliated with the CIO Food, Tobacco, Agricultural and Allied Workers of America, which the diocese alleged to be Communist dominated. Spellman became involved and agreed to deal with the local only after it disaffiliated with the international within 48 hours.[30] This was an ultimatum which certainly did not constitute good faith bargaining on the part of the Cardinal. The union refused and the strike continued. Spellman then took what his biographer Robert Gannon called the “dramatic and courageous step” of leading a group of seminarians through the picket line at Calvary Cemetery to bury bodies and to break the strike.[31] Spellman admitted to being a strikebreaker and said he was proud of it. “If stopping a strike like this isn’t a thing of honor,” the Cardinal said, “then I don’t know what honor is.”[32]

Spellman’s interference may have seemed to be an honorable action to him, but it was characterized as paternalism by other Catholics, notably those of the Catholic Worker and the Association of Catholic Trade Unionists. John Harold, the ACTU Counsel, said:

With all reverence and respect for the Cardinal, it is more important to recognize the right of workers to organize and bargain collectively in unions of their own choosing, and to pay the living a just wage, and to bury the dead.[33]

The Cardinal’s actions in the cemetery strike provide a key to his thoughts and a clue to Catholic anticommunism in general. Human freedom was not as important as control and power. Here, Spellman had the power to break a strike and thus thwart the will of a group of workers. A Communist regime would have been vilified by Spellman for doing the same thing. Thus one man’s honor is another’s authoritarianism.

It would be a mistake to confuse Spellman’s anticommunism with a preference for democracy. The Cardinal was, in fact, a supporter of right-wing dictatorships abroad and an opponent of civil liberties at home. His involvement in the censorship of movies provides a good example of his disinterest in civil liberties.

The Legion of Decency was a Catholic organization designed to rate films according to their “moral” context, generally based on sex, skin, language, attitude toward family life, etc. Films were rated in several categories ranging from “morally unobjectionable” to “condemned.” These ratings were binding on Catholic moviegoers. Spellman took the movie question a step further by urging the banning of certain “objectionable” films by the state authorities.

One such film, The Miracle, was banned by the Commissioner of License of New York as “blasphemous.” Spellman had publicly voiced opposition to this film and was thought to have exercised his influence in organizing picket lines around the theater where it was shown.[34] The New York ban was later reversed by the U.S. Supreme Court on the grounds that a film may not be banned upon a holding that it is “sacrilegious.”[35]

The Cardinal made similar efforts with respect to The Moon is Blue and most notably the Tennessee Williams comedy Baby Doll. The latter became something of an obsession for Spellman in 1956. The Catholic News of that year was filled with comment echoing the Cardinal’s stand. This matter was so crucial that Spellman denounced the film from the pulpit of St. Patrick’s, a manner of pronouncement usually reserved for the most crucial issues. Catholics who viewed Baby Doll were committing a sin, according to Spellman:

In the performance of my duty as Archbishop of New York, in solicitude for the welfare of souls entrusted to my care and the welfare of my country, I exhort Catholic people to refrain from patronizing this film under pain of sin.[36]

Spellman’s support for Joe McCarthy and for congressional hearings to expose Communists was widely acknowledged and well-summarized in his Brussels speech of 1954.[37] The basis of the Cardinal’s statements and actions in this regard, as with movie viewing, was that political opinions must be closely monitored and curtailed if they are not consistent with particular ends. As Spellman stated in a 1948 speech:

Within our country today are powerful groups, both conservative and radical, who must be prepared to yield some part of their ideas for the great course of humanity if we are going to survive.[38]

This statement is a revealing example of Spellman’s thought. He did not say that some groups would have to limit their activities. They would have to yield some of their “ideas.” Film censorship, hearings into past affiliations, and yielding ideas are useful in controlling undesirable attitudes and opinions. Nowhere in the Cardinal’s speeches and writings can one find support for a free flow of information and ideas. There was much support, however, for authoritarian regimes which curtailed civil liberties while opposing communism and supporting the Catholic Church.

In 1956, for example, Spellman went to the Dominican Republic and praised its dictator, Rafael Trujillo. His dismal record on human rights did not bother the Cardinal since like himself, Trujillo was an anticommunist. According to Spellman,

The Dominican Republic has been among the first to recognize the need for solidarity of the Americas: The threat to the Americas of World Communism. Perhaps long after your [Trujillo’s] physical achievements have disappeared, you will be remembered for your courage and wisdom in this regard.[39]

Spellman visited Spain on several occasions, ostensibly at the invitation of Spanish bishops. Although he denied any political implications of these trips, he met Franco on several occasions and was, in fact, a supporter of the Generalissimo as a staunch anticommunist. On his 1959 Christmas tour, Spellman made a pilgrimage to Spain’s Valley of the Fallen and visited its basilica, erected in memory of members of Franco’s forces who died in the civil war. Spellman called the basilica “a symbol in the world’s fight against communism.”[40]

Perhaps it was the Cardinal’s preference for the type of close church-state relationship that existed in Franco’s Spain that resulted in the strangest episode in Spellman’s career — his public dispute with Eleanor Roosevelt, widow of the former president, in 1949.

Spellman was an active proponent of released time for religious instruction, aid to parochial schools, and public transportation for Catholic school students. When Rep. Graham Barden of North Carolina introduced a bill providing federal aid to public schools only, Spellman countered with a speech entitled “Barden Bill — Brewer of Bigotry.” As the Cardinal saw it, “a vote for the Barden Bill is a vote against parental rights, against constitutional rights, against America’s education as a whole, against America herself!”[41]

Eleanor Roosevelt opposed federal aid to parochial schools on the grounds that it would violate the separation of church and state. In fact, Mrs. Roosevelt opposed federal funds for any private schools. The Cardinal wrote a letter to Mrs. Roosevelt that criticized her stand on the issue and also attacked her personally. This letter was vintage Spellman since it also included patriotism, anticommunist and military references. First, the Cardinal wrote that her columns contained “manifold” inaccuracies. She was precluded from understanding the issues involved because of her “attitude of mind.” The heart of the letter then accused Mrs. Roosevelt of being anti-Catholic and unsympathetic to Cardinal Mindszenty and to American war veterans:

American freedom not only permits but encourages differences of opinion and I do not question your right to differ with me. But why I wonder do you repeatedly plead causes that are anti-Catholic? Even if you cannot find it within your heart to defend the rights of innocent little children and heroic, helpless men like Cardinal Mindszenty, can you not have the charity not to cast upon them still another stone?

America’s Catholic youth fought a long and bitter fight to save all Americans from oppression and persecution. Their broken bodies on blood-soaked foreign fields were given as tragic testimony to this fact. I saw them there — on every fighting front — as they equally shared with their fellow fighters all the sacrifice, terror, and gore of war — as alike their shared the little good and glory that sometimes comes to men as together they fight and win a brutal battle.

Would you deny equality to these Catholic boys who daily stood at the threshold of untimely death and suffered martyrdom that you and I and the world of men might live in liberty and peace?

Spellman concluded this broadside with a personal attack on Mrs. Roosevelt:

Whatever you may say in the future, your record of anti-Catholicism stands for all to see — a record which you yourself wrote on the pages of history which cannot be recalled — documents of discrimination unworthy of an American mother![42]

Although this close relationship soured toward the end, the death of Spellman’s close friend, Pope Pius XII, in 1958 marked the beginning of the end of Spellman’s power. The new pope, John XXIII, sought a dialogue with Marxists and changes in the Church. Such changes as ecumenicalism and the use of the vernacular in the liturgy were instituted by the second ecumenical council (Vatican II). Most of John’s initiatives were opposed by Spellman, who considered the new pope unworthy of the title.

In at least one instance, Spellman directly disobeyed the pope’s wishes. In 1959 John appointed Spellman as a delegate to a Eucharistic Congress in Guatemala. Spellman was to visit Nicaragua on the way. John asked him not to have his picture taken with Anastasio Somosa, the dictator who had just had several political prisoners executed. Spellman had the picture taken. When asked if his picture would be used on a Nicaraguan stamp, he replied with calculated “humility” that he could not possibly grace a stamp alone. Thus, two stamps were issued, one with Spellman’s likeness, the other with that of Pope John XXIII.[43]

The winds of a new era caused Spellman to break with his longtime ally in anticommunist causes, former ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy. Spellman privately opposed the presidential bid of his son John. The Cardinal’s reason was that even though he was a Catholic, John F. Kennedy believed in the separation of church and state, opposed federal aid to parochial schools, and said he would not appoint an ambassador to the Vatican.[44]  David Powers, a JFK aide, gave another reason. Spellman, according to Powers, was the most powerful Catholic in the United States. If Kennedy was elected, he would be the most powerful.[45]

Spellman was a supporter of the Vietnam War, which he called “Christ’s war against the Vietcong and the people of North Vietnam.”[46] This put him in direct conflict with John XXIII’s successor, Pope Paul VI, who attempted to bring about peace negotiations. Spellman became more hawkish as the war went on and was disturbed by the antiwar activities of nuns, priests, and laypeople within the archdiocese, such as Daniel and Philip Berrigan and the people at The Catholic Worker. In January 1967, antiwar demonstrators entered St. Patrick’s with signs protesting the Cardinal’s support of the war. Thus, in the last year of his life, the Cardinal’s power had declined such that his sanctuary was invaded by those of his own flock, directly and brazenly confronting the man who had ruled so strongly for so many years.

By the time of Spellman’s death on December 2, 1967, his rabid nationalism and anticommunism were relics of another era. While anticommunism was the main political current of the Cold War, by World War II few people, aside from Bible Belt fundamentalists, were still questioning the loyalty of U.S. Catholics. Yet their patriotism and service to the country were always mentioned in a Spellman speech. The fear that Catholics were being left out of federal aid to education that led to his intemperate attack on Eleanor Roosevelt was part of this avenue of thinking. It was a Catholic habit from the beginnings of the United States to protect loyalty to the nation. Spellman did so as well, but he was not an outsider. As head of the Catholics in the largest city in the country and as Military Vicar, he had easy access to national and world leaders and to the news media. He was truly a power broker, an insider with an audience of millions.

Spellman was a paradox in that he had influence and power, but he conveyed the attitudes of a small-town parish priest. Like a parish priest, he was most proud of his building projects. The Catholic News had a special issue devoted to the Cardinal in 1957. One article noted that during Spellman’s 18 years in New York, 201 elementary and 55 high school projects had been completed.[47] As previously noted, The Catholic News gave a great deal of coverage to this aspect of Spellman’s activities throughout the years.

Spellman was also closely tied, rhetorically at least, to his Irish roots. If he could connect Ireland with anticommunism, he would jump at the chance for hyperbole. At the St. Patrick’s Day mass of 1953, he said:

Roman legions could never conquer Ireland, nor will Moscow ever take over Dublin. But the Irish and the Russian people have much in common in fact, as the Russian people are reawakening from their opium hangover of communism, they are now being conditioned for the arrival of a man like St. Patrick to light a beacon cross on a Russian mountain in defiance of godless communism, the modern Druidism whose colors have been changed from black magic to red to fan into flames the embers in the hearts of these simple, oppressed, bewildered, God-loving little people — to blaze a trail back to Christ, the light of the world. Russia desperately needs another Resurrection, it needs a Hill of Stone, it needs a St. Patrick.[48]

One aspect of Spellman’s life that has received attention in recent years concerns his alleged homosexuality. References to the subject were dropped from John Cooney’s 1984 book, The American Pope, because the editors felt additional substantiation was needed.[49] A number of articles written about the book made reference to the rumors about the Cardinal’s sexual preferences and maintained that these rumors were, at best, irrelevant.[50] This author has heard similar assertions from various sources. Nicholas von Hoffman, in his 1988 biography of Roy Cohn, Citizen Cohn: The Life and Times of Roy Cohn, writes about Cohn’s long relationship with Spellman. Hoffman relates the stories that abounded in New York Catholic circles about Spellman’s homosexuality, his liaisons outside the clergy, and his favorites within.[51] Cohn, counsel to Senator McCarthy’s committee, was a homosexual who died of AIDS. Cohn was also a close friend of Spellman from the McCarthy years to the end of the Cardinal’s life. He handled many of the legal affairs of the New York Archdiocese and often entertained Spellman on his yacht. Both men were friends of J. Edgar Hoover, whose own homosexuality has been long suspected.

Assertions about the homosexuality of Spellman, Cohn, and Hoover have a relevance that transcends gossip. There is no evidence of any sexual relationships between Spellman, Cohn, and Hoover. These men, however, were allies in the anticommunist cause. They railed against the secrecy, duplicity, and conspiratorial nature of Communists. All of them spoke and wrote about the moral decay threatening American society, of which communism was only one factor. Yet each of these crusaders led a life as duplicitous as any communist, and each presented a false front to the world. They cried out against the communist conspiracy, but carried on a conspiracy of their own. It is ironic that after so many years, the common thread that emerges to link a Catholic, a Protestant, and a Jew in the anticommunist crusade should be their secret homosexuality. These men who condemned so many others for their associations and lifestyles, themselves lived lives that they did not dare to expose to public view. In the context of their times, the inquisitors had more to hide than those they sought to “expose.” A strange epilogue to the story.

 

Fulton J. Sheen was the best known American Catholic of his era. He was a master of radio and television communications, who, at the peak of his popularity in the 1950’s, received an average of 20,000 letters per day.[52] A regular speaker on the Catholic Hour Broadcasts on NBC from 1930-1952, Sheen had his own regular TV program from 1951-57. The series “Life is Worth Living” (ABC) was seen by as many as 30 million people each week. In 1952, Sheen received TV’s Emmy Award for this program.

Throughout his long public career, Sheen communicated his message through radio, TV, lectures, books, and syndicated columns. The substantial body of work he left behind embodied several recurring themes — family and marriage, teenagers, Freud, Darwin, Marx, and communism. Sheen had much to say on the subject of communism, but his anticommunism, unlike that of Cardinal Spellman, was part of a larger theme. According to Sheen, communism, like Darwinism and Freudianism, held that people were governed by forces beyond their control, rather than by their own free will. Sheen argued that communism, evolution, and psychiatry had a mechanistic explanation for man’s actions. Catholics thought, on the other hand, that every person had free will, was responsible for his own actions, and, therefore, answerable to God. This was a thread that constantly ran through Sheen’s works during the entire course of his career.

Sheen’s background was well suited to dealing with the main currents of thought of his generation. Born in Illinois in 1895, and ordained in Peoria, Sheen would never return to his native roots. He studied philosophy at the prestigious University of Leuven in Belgium and received the agrege (highest degree) with highest distinction. Sheen later taught philosophy at the Catholic University in Washington D.C. (1926-1950). From 1950-1957, Sheen served as National Director of the Society for the Propagation of the Faith and as editor of its magazine.

This position, along with his TV series and syndicated column, made Sheen a highly visible, popular, and influential person. He had a vast platform from which to communicate his message and, consequently, his counsel was sought by many. In fact, a number of prominent public persons sought Sheen’s instruction in order to convert to Catholicism. These conversions, including some by former communists, provided another platform for Sheen’s thoughts and opinions on those subjects so close to him.

One of Sheen’s most notorious communist converts was Louis Budenz, once the editor of The Daily Worker. Sheen instructed Budenz in private and baptized him in 1945. The instruction was done secretly so that after it was completed, Sheen, ever the media wizard, could notify the Associated Press that the former communist had been received into the Church.[53] Budenz was then immediately appointed at Notre Dame.[54] He later taught at Fordham and he served as a prominent anticommunist lecturer, writer, and witness throughout the Cold War.

Sheen also converted Heywood Broun, a writer and a leftist. At his funeral, Sheen told of his conversations with Broun, who had not actually been a communist, but who had associated with radicals. According to Sheen, after 90 hours of instruction and then conversion and baptism, Broun “realized that much liberalizing was extremely illiberal.” Sheen said that Broun had come to believe that “no social philosophy is quite as revolutionary as that of the Church.”[55]

When he converted Henry Ford II, Sheen used the opportunity to chastise the West for helping communism by not living up to Christian values.[56]

Other Sheen converts who were prominent anticommunists included Bella Dodd, Clare Booth Luce, and Gretta Palmer. Palmer wrote a column for the Catholic News that often had an anticommunist theme. She was also the author of God’s Underground in Asia, a book about the suppression of religion by the communists.[57]

In 1978, many years after Clare Booth Luce’s conversion by Sheen, a proposal was sent to the Luce Foundation for $50,000 to establish the Sheen Archives. Mrs. Luce was not a trustee of the Foundation, which had been established by her husband, Time-Life publisher Henry Luce. Apparently, those who were trustees lacked any sentimental attachment to Fulton Sheen. The proposal was rejected because other programs were a drain on the foundation’s resources.[58]

Sheen’s anticommunism stemmed from a belief that fundamentally, communism was an alternative religion, and was, at its core, fundamentally in opposition to Christianity. Concerning communism in Russia, Sheen wrote:

It may very well be that the basic reason why communism appealed to Russia was religious. Deeply embedded in the Russian soul were passionate religious convictions: the universal vocation of Russia to call all men to brotherhood; the need of sacrifice and pain to accomplish their mission, and the supreme need of resigning oneself to God’s Will… communism is a religion, a surrender to the absolute.[59]

Sheen was an active anticommunist long before the Cold War. In 1936, he wrote an article for The Sign entitled “The Tactics of Communism.”[60] This article, which the editor noted was to be published in pamphlet form, was written in a question and answer format. For example:

Q-Who was the first one in the history of Christianity
To use the tactics of the United Front?
A-Judas, by betraying our Lord with a kiss.

The article was filled with the familiar criticisms of communism — that it advocated revolution, abolition of religion and private property, and that it achieved its goals by burrowing from within.” There was much about Party leader Earl Browder’s attempt to form a “United Front” of communists and non-communist liberals and leftists in the U.S. in imitation of the arrangement then current in Europe. The article made extensive use of quotes from Russian and American communist leaders so that the “questions” posed were answered with the leaders’ own words.

In a series of articles in The Franciscan in 1937, Sheen attempted to get to the roots of what was wrong with communism. Communists were atheists, according to Sheen, because they held that religion taught the rich their rights and the poor their place, while making man a passive creature. Sheen then systematically attacked these propositions. In his view, the great encyclicals Rerum Novarum and Quadragesimo Anno clearly delineated the proper role and responsibility of capital and the rights of workers.[61] As for the argument that religion made people passive, Sheen wrote: “The Church, it is true, does preach resignation to our lot, but this does not mean passivity. Rather it is resignation oriented toward action.”[62]

In the next article in the series, Sheen reversed the argument and accused communism of being the “opium” of the people:

• It exploits the poor by teaching them the rights of the Communist Party;
• It puts the poor to sleep by promising something it can never deliver, namely, an earthly paradise;
• It makes man passive by making him an instrument of the Communist Party.

[63]

Sheen then catalogued the situation in the Soviet Union during the early and mid-1930’s. The shooting of officials allegedly responsible for disastrous harvests showed that under communism man is passive — a mere function of social “progress.” Sheen concluded with a good summary of Catholic anticommunism of the 1930’s:

We have seen [Communists] outlaw religion in Russia, exile its priesthood and murder its people; we have seen them close the churches of Mexico; we have seen them crucify priests in Spain, disinter the graves of religious persons and scatter their remains before cathedral doors. We have seen their anti-religious museums; we have read their anti-God literature; but not all we have seen and heard them do and say against religion has convinced us that there is no God. They have only convinced us that there is a Devil.[64]

Sheen, like many U.S. Catholics, was a strong supporter of Francisco Franco during the Spanish Civil War. In 1939, Sheen was one of the speakers at a rally sponsored by “The Keep the Spanish Embassy Committee.” Among those attending was Dorothy Day, who was attracted to the cause by the seemingly pacifistic intent of continuing a U.S. arms embargo to both sides of the struggle. By 1939, however, the “neutrality” advocated by Sheen and others only served to help Franco.

Sheen’s defense of neutrality was harshly critical of the Republican side and supportive of Franco. People who wanted the embargo lifted were anti-Franco but not anti-communist, according to Sheen, since some were members of communist “front” organizations such as the American League for Peace and Democracy. Sheen criticized “front” organizations in the U.S. for not condemning communism. Although Sheen acknowledged that some people who advocated lifting the embargo were sincere and honest in their beliefs, he still attacked their arguments. The Republican side was, after all, receiving arms from the Soviet Union. The Soviets, in fact, were responsible for the whole mess in Europe. If there had not been a Stalin, Sheen argued, there would not have been a Mussolini or a Hitler.[65]

Sheen also catalogued the crimes committed against churches and clergy in communist-dominated areas of Spain. Although Sheen began and ended his speech with a plea for neutrality in order to keep U.S. hands free from blood, the entire talk was anti-Republican because communists were on the Republican side.

In a “Catholic Hour” radio broadcast in 1938, Sheen again argued that communism was the cause of fascism. This tactic enabled Sheen to seem opposed to both philosophies while demonstrating that communism was the greater evil. “Fascism,” according to Sheen, “is the reaction against communism. If then you want to keep fascism out of America, the best thing to do is to keep out communism.”[66]

At a Loyalty Day rally in 1949, Sheen addressed 117,000 people at New York’s Polo Grounds. The audience included such notables as Vice President Alben W. Barkley, New York City Mayor William O’Dwyer, and Cardinal Spellman. Loyalty Day had been designed to coincide with May Day as an antidote to the latter. Not surprisingly, therefore, Sheen’s theme was communism.

The essence of America, according to Sheen, was that rights are bestowed by God, not by men. Therefore rights cannot be taken away by any human power:

That is why we are opposed to any diabolical system which would say that rights and liberties come from man. While we know this evil system, yet nevertheless let me answer you that Communism is not the promise of a new era. It is the dying gasp of an old age. It is made up of all the cheap agnostic, atheistic philosophies of the 18^th and 19^th centuries.[67]

Sheen warned that Americans should beware of “insidious influences” caused by Soviet deception. In particular, he expressed concern about the possibility of “some great cultural movement sponsored by so-called intelligentsia — and intelligentsia are those who have been educated beyond their intelligence.” According to Sheen, because such a movement presented a clear danger, “it would be suggested in some paid advertisement in one of our newspapers that we ought to open up all of the treasures and secrets of the United States to this foreign power (the U.S.S.R.)” because intellectuals were liable to claim that they could not operate freely in an atmosphere of secrecy.[68]

Americans, according to Sheen, also needed to remember that communism could not be judged by Russia’s foreign policy when, as in World War II, it coincided with the West’s:

No. Russian communism is intrinsically evil and has nothing whatever to do with Russia’s foreign policy. We have been on record from the beginning as saying that communism is intrinsically evil and that we will resist it despite all of its tactics and techniques.[69]

Sheen did not speak off the top of his head on the subject of communism. He, in fact, produced a large body of work to support his thesis that communism was “intrinsically evil.” Communism and the Conscience of the West, published in 1948, was an exhaustive study of communism as a philosophy.[70] Although highly critical of communism, this book at least attempted to explain its theory, an attempt rarely made by Catholic anticommunists. The chapter on the philosophy of communism was a brave attempt to show the evolution of Marx’s thought from Hegel’s dialectical materialism through Marx’s economic determinism and historical materialism, and also noted the influence of Feuerbach and Prouhon. Catholic works on communism generally reduced Marxism to a philosophy that denied spiritual qualities and saw man as merely an economic abstraction.

The book was “Dedicated to Mary, Gracious Mother — Heart of the Worlds Saviours in Purposeful Hope of the Conversion of Russia.” In the preface, Sheen stated that communism was not an economic doctrine, but rather a credo that dehumanized man by making him a social animal. Sheen, like many Catholic anticommunists, blamed liberalism for the rise of communism because liberalism rejected religion and placed faith in progress and nationalism. According to Sheen and others, liberalism meant that man did what he wanted to do and rejected moral absolutes. Communists then took the liberals’ rejection of religion one step further by countering the Church with its own “infallibly defined dogmas of dialectical materialism, economic determinism and its labor theory of value.”[71]

Communism and the Conscience of the West presented the struggle against communism in the apocalyptic terms of a final battle “between the Kingdom of mass atheism and the Kingdom of God.”[72] The impetus of the battle lay in the West’s failure to give due regard to God, thus leaving the ground fertile for communism:

Communism is related to our materialistic Western civilization as putrefaction is to disease. Many of the ideas which our bourgeois civilization has sold at retail, communism sells at wholesale…both believe in egotism; our own Western civilization believing in individual egotism; communism believing it should be collective. Our Western bourgeois world is un-Christian; Communism is anti-Christian.”[73]

The Catholic Church, Sheen maintained, was the only moral force in the world “consistently opposed to the new barbarism.”[74] While communism emphasized social use to the exclusion of personal rights and capitalism emphasized the personal to the exclusion of the social, the Church said both were wrong. The Church, according to Sheen, said the right to property was personal, but the use of property was social. “The true Christian,” wrote Sheen, “must rid himself of the delusion that in opposing communism the Church thereby puts itself in opposition to all those who would seek thus to change the present economic system.”[75] Sheen tried to put the Church in the middle ground philosophically as opposing materialism, whether social (communist) or personal (capitalist), thus favoring social change while opposing communism. This philosophy was attractive to Sheen and a few other Catholic thinkers, but it was impossible in the world of 1948 or later to find a developed society that was not capitalist, communist, socialist, or liberal.

Communism and monopolistic capitalism were both unsatisfying systems because they removed sovereignty from God. Capitalism did so by making an individual the absolute owner of property; communism, by making the “bureaucrats of collectivism the absolute owner.”[76] Sheen proposed a rather weak solution which consisted of giving the workers some share of management and profits. This was a thin line to tread, however, since too much control would be socialism, while profit sharing in the form of Christmas bonuses would be “paternalistic.”[77]

Sheen’s anticommunism showed its greatest conviction when dealing with the evils of communism as a result of the decay of Western civilization. His chapter on “Our Lady of Fatima and Russia” presents Sheen at his best because it weaves a cloth from threads of reality, revelation, apocalypse, and miracles.

Sheen started by placing the beginning of the modern world in 1858, “and by the modern world,” Sheen wrote, “we mean in distinction to the Christian world.”[78] In that year, John Stuart Mill wrote his Essay on Liberty “in which liberty was indentified with license and absence from social responsibility.” Darwin completed Origin of the Species and Marx wrote his introduction to the Critique of Political Economy. Sheen summed up the work of these three men as follows:

From these men have come the ideas which have dominated the world for almost a century — namely, that man is not divine but animal in his origin; his freedom is license and escape from authority and law; devoid of spirit, he is an integral part of the matter of the cosmos, and therefore has no need of religion.[79]

It was not a coincidence, according to Sheen, that also in 1858, the Blessed Virgin appeared to St. Bernadette in Lourdes, France and proclaimed, “I am the Immaculate Conception,” thus establishing the fact of original sin, then under attack by the likes of Mill, Darwin, and Marx. “If she alone and uniquely was immaculately conceived,” according to Sheen, “then everyone else was born in the state of original sin.”[80]

Sheen believed that the “pagan ideas of 1858,” that “man is an animal,” freedom is “isolation from law,” and that “religion is antihuman,” were responsible for World War I.[81] At the same time, the communist revolution occurred in Russia in 1917 and the suppression of religion in that country began. Also in 1917, the Blessed Virgin appeared to three children in Fatima, Portugal. Sheen noted that this event occurred on the same day (May 13) that communist horsemen entered a church in Moscow, destroyed the statues and killed some children. When the teacher protested these occurrences to one of the revolutionaries, he said, “I know, I sent them.” The revolutionary was Lenin.[82]

Sheen used Fatima as a background for his vision of what was wrong with the modern world. The timing of Fatima, during the First World War and the Russian Revolution, the message about coming bad times, and the promise to convert Russia, presented a union of apocalypse and of the end of times. The first impulse was the turning away from God in 1858; the culmination was the war and revolution of 1917. In each of these years, the Blessed Virgin issued a message detailing a way to regain Christ by “spiritual regeneration.” “Soviet Russia is not the sole danger to the Western world,” wrote Sheen; rather it is the despiritualization of the Western world to which Russia gave political form and social substance.”[83]

Sheen saw the answer to the problem of the modern world in a return to the church and to spiritualism. Secular civilizations (Babylon, Athens, Sparta) fell and never rose again. The Church had been beset by heresies, by the thought of Voltaire and Darwin, and by modern totalitarianism, but remained vital and living. According to Sheen:

Civilizations are cycles, they are recurrent, they do through the same phenomena of birth and death and never come to life again. Religion, however, is a continuous upward linear movement, rising to new heights after the decay of each particular civilization. As a Christian civilization grew out of the decay of the Greco-Roman world, so a new Christian order will grow out of the decay of historical liberalism and communism.[84]

The ideas set forth in Communism and the Conscience of the West were not fleeting thoughts instigated by the onset of the Cold War. Sheen saw the world order breaking down fifteen years later. In Missions and the World Crisis (1963), Sheen wrote:

The West is experiencing the death throb of the disintegration of the secular culture initiated in the Renaissance, which stressed the self-sufficiency of man. The East is feeling the decay of its centuries-old ethical systems, such as Buddhism, Confucianism, and all the other problems which sought to solve the problem of man.[85]

Communism, according to Sheen, while intrinsically evil, had a role to play in our civilization, by polarizing the forces and good and evil. It was the “manure of our civilization” which fertilized the growth of the forces of Christ. It was Christ’s forces rather than those of communism that would bring about a new order. Communism, according to Sheen’s now familiar thesis, was not the birth of a new order:

It is rather the death of the old one: the last foul breath of cheap Rationalism, Deism, and Agnosticism of eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century German thought dynamized by Asiatic nihilism.[86]

Of the cheap rationalism and agnostics, Sheen saw Marx and Freud as the main villains. Consequently, these men were the subjects of many of Sheen’s barbs.

In a speech at the College of Mt. Saint Vincent in 1947, for example, Sheen said that Marxism and Freudianism were both manifestations of the fundamental craving for brotherhood and redemption from sin. Yet these schools of thought could not satisfy this craving. Communism denied God and unity must be spiritual. Freudianism overemphasized the erotic and could not provide peace of mind because it denied guilt and sin.[87] While often criticizing communism for being a substitute religion, Sheen defended the Church against charges that it was like communism in its authoritarianism. In a tape recording entitled “Freedom and Decency,” made for Keep the Faith, Inc., a traditionalist Catholic group, Sheen argued that the Church was based on love, while communism was based on dogma, the party, and class struggle. The Church, not communism, allowed freedom of thought. In fact, the only freedom restricted by the Church was the “freedom to fall into error.”

Sheen summed up communists as follows:

Communists are not born of a love… Scrutinize their hearts and it will be discovered that their Communism is born, sometimes of an uneasy conscience, which is the result of bad behavior, which evil conscience is requited for the moment by a hatred of God and religion; other times, it is inspired by a hidden avarice or greed… no more miserable, unhappy, distraught, and disturbed people exist in the world than Communists.[88]

Sheen lived long past the Cold War. He concluded his career as Bishop of Rochester, New York from 1966-1969, and then served in various honorary positions until his death in 1979. He will, of course, be best remembered as a spokesman for the Catholic view on the issues of the era.

Sheen was a propagandist against the modern world. His analysis had a broad enough historical perspective to link the ideas of Mill, Darwin, Marx, and Freud as modern. By using the modern world/Christian world dichotomy, Sheen was able to link together numerous philosophies that did not accept the idea of a God-centered society. Thus, socialism, communism, liberalism, and capitalism were all parts of the same “materialism” that was driving Western society to its decline.  Through this linkage, Sheen avoided the current controversies of socialism vs. capitalism, communism vs. fascism. All of these ideas were wrong, according to Sheen, because all denied God’s central role in human society. Sheen gave 1858 as the pivotal year when such ideas began to destroy the West, although some Catholic thinkers believed the West’s decline began when the Enlightenment and the French Revolution signaled the start of the modern world.

The dichotomy described by Sheen was also a convenient device since he could rail against communism without seeming to favor the excesses of monopoly capitalism. It was the “materialism” of the modern world that was the enemy. Communism and capitalism were two sides of the same coin.

Darwinism and Freudianism were also responsible for the troubles of the world, according to Sheen. These theories presented a mechanistic view of humankind. People descended from other life forms and behaved according to the subconscious mind. Where in this scheme was God’s hand in creation? Where was a person’s free will? Where, in a world governed by materialism and populated by people whose behavior was controlled by their neuroses and psychoses, was there room for the Church? This was Sheen’s message. He was a spokesman for the Church and against the modern world, in which he feared the Church was losing its central position. The Catholic Church may never again have such an eloquent spokesman.

In contrast to Sheen’s philosophical jousts with the most prominent ideas of the era, Francis Cardinal Spellman presented a blatant, sentimental nationalism. This was endlessly demonstrated in his visits to military installations throughout the world and in his maudlin use of the images of American boys dying in far-flung lands. Spellman’s career was devoid of the thoughtful and consistent philosophy of Sheen. The Cardinal was, instead, a performer. It is ironic, of course, that while Sheen made extensive use of TV, radio, lecture tours, and newspaper columns, Spellman never missed the opportunity for the public stage. He made dramatic speeches about baseball and Korea, was constantly photographed with the troops, picked a public fight with Eleanor Roosevelt, personally led a group of strikebreakers, and crusaded against certain films. On the more prosaic level, he participated in the dedications of hundreds of churches, hospitals, convents, and wings and additions thereof.

Spellman’s anticommunism did not have the philosophical depth of Sheen’s. Communism was a threat to the Church and a threat to America. This was sufficient for Spellman. He did not oppose communism because it was a dictatorial system. In fact, Spellman supported many dictators, including Franco, Trujillo, and Somoza. These dictators had supported the Church so their internal policies were irrelevant to the Cardinal. Spellman would limit freedom as long as it was limited in a way that could be construed as anticommunist. Thus, Spellman opposed the freedom of cemetery workers to choose their own union, favored film censorship, supported McCarthy and anticommunist witch hunts, and called for groups to give up their ideas for the good of the nation.

Publicly, Spellman presented a paradox. He was the leader of Catholics in the largest, most cosmopolitan city in the nation, and a figure of national and international prominence. Yet he spoke as if he were a humble parish priest, constantly trying to guide his flock and protect them from disturbing ideas. He preached with a florid rhetoric that was devoice of ideas but restated the same message with varying dramatic flourishes.

Spellman’s successor, Jerrome Cardinal Cooke, never tried to fill the void left by Spellman and was, instead, a low-key, undramatic administrator. It was probably wise for Cooke to take this route since a Cardinal Spellman cannot be imitated.

Spellman and Sheen were the quintessential public men. They represented the American Catholic Church’s coming of age in this century. They unabashedly presented their message to Catholics and to the public at large on an equal footing with spokesmen of other causes. The anticommunist message they delivered during the Cold War was in tune with the times. That message, and the manner in which it was delivered, made Francis Spellman and Fulton Sheen the U.S.  Catholic Church’s most visible and popular figures and two of the nation’s leading Cold War anticommunists.

[1] The archdiocese of New York was not the largest diocese in the United States. Since two of the city’s most populous boroughs, Brooklyn and Queens, were part of the separate Diocese of Brooklyn, Chicago was the largest Catholic diocese.

[2] For a treatment of Spellman’s early years, see generally his official biography, Robert Gannon, S.J. The Cardinal Spellman Story (Doubleday, Garden City: 1962).

For a more cultural view, see generally John Cooney, The American Pope (Times Books, New York: 1984).

[3] Gannon, 189.

[4] Cooney, 124.

[5] Time 19 August 1957, 7.

[6] Spellman, Francis, “Communism is Un-American,” (Constitutional Education League, Inc.: 1947), pamphlet reprinted from The American Legion Magazine, 3.

[7] Spellman, 4.

[8] Spellman, 5.

[9] Spellman, 6.

[10] New York Times 29 September 1947, 12.

[11] Cooney, 146-161.

[12] New York Times 13 October 1947, 1.

[13] The Catholic News 20 March 1948, 1, 3.

[14] Time 13 September 1954, 27.

[15] The Catholic News 7 August 1954, 1, 14.

[16] New York Times 10 May 1953, 81.

[17] The Catholic News 31 March 1951, 6.

[18] Gannon, 382.

[19] The Catholic News 11 May 1957, 12.

[20] Gannon, 349.

[21] Gannon, 350.

[22] The Catholic News 15 April 1950, 40.

[23] Gannon, 338.

[24] The Catholic News 18 September 1948, 1.

[25] The Catholic News 18 September 1948, 1.

[26] New York Times 7 February 1949, 3.

[27] New York Times 7 February 1949, 3.

[28] New York Times 7 February 1949, 3.

[29] New York Times 6 September 1959, 7.

[30] Gannon, 279.

[31] Gannon, 279.

[32] Time 14 March 1949, 63.

[33] Time 14 March, 1949, 63.

[34] Gannon, 333.

[35] Burstyn v. Watson, 343 U.S. 497 (1952).

[36] Gannon, 335.

[37] See Gannon, 348-351

[38] Time 7 February 1948, 5.

[39] Gannon, 403.

[40] Gannon, 351.

[41] Gannon, 313.

[42] Gannon, 316-318.

[43] Cooney, 279.

[44] Cooney, 266.

[45] Cooney, xix.

[46] Cooney, 306.

[47] The Catholic News 7 September 1957, 19.

[48]The Catholic News 21 March 1957, 24.

[49] The New York Times 2 August 1984, C20.

[50] See William V. Shannon’s review of The American Pope, New York Times Book Review, 28 October 1984, 11; George DeWar — “Spellman, Warts and All,” Newsday, 7 November 1984, Part II, 3.

[51] Von Hoffman, Nicholas Citizen Cohn (Doubleday, New York, 1988), 279.

[52] Sheen, Fulton J. Treasure in Clay: The Autobiography of Fulton J. Sheen (Doubleday & Co., Inc. Garden City, New York, 1980) 66.

[53] Sheen, 266.

[54] Newsweek 22 October 1945, 99.

[55] Sheen, Fulton J. The Conversion of Heywood Broun (St. Paul Society, undated, pamphlet from Sheen archives).

[56] Time 14 April 1952, 72.

[57] The Catholic News 22 August 1953.

[58] See handwritten footnote #50.

[59] Sheen, Treasure in Clay, 89.

[60] Sheen, “Tactics of Communism” The Sign November 1936, 201.

[61] See generally, Chapter _______Review

[62] Sheen, “Communism: The Opium of the People,” The Franciscan January 1937, 6.

[63] Sheen, The Franciscan, February 1937, 8.

[64] Sheen, The Franciscan, February 1937, 24.

[65] Pamphlet — National Council of Catholic Men, “The Keep the Spanish Embargo Committee,” speeches delivered 9 January 1939, 47 — Sheen Archives.

[66] The Catholic Hour (radio broadcast 20 February 1938), reprinted by the Knights of Columbus (New Haven) — Sheen Archives.

[67] The Catholic News, 7 May 1949, 17.

[68] Ibid.

[69] Ibid.

[70] Sheen, Fulton J. Communism and the Conscience of the West (Bobbs-Merrill, Company; Indianapolis, New York, 1948)

[71] Sheen, Fulton J. Communism and the Conscience of the West, 26.

[72] Sheen, Fulton J. Communism and the Conscience of the West, 47.

[73] Ibid, 48.

[74] Ibid, 78.

[75] Ibid, 79.

[76] Ibid, 122.

[77] Ibid, 128.

[78] Ibid, 199.

[79] Ibid, 200.

[80] Ibid, 200.

[81] Ibid, 201.

[82] Ibid, 201.

[83] Ibid, 208

[84] Ibid, 214.

[85] Fulton J. Sheen Missions and the World Crisis (Brace Publishing Co., Milwaukee, 1963), 8.

[86] Ibid, 9.

[87] The New York Times 7 October, 1947, 30.

[88] A Fulton Sheen Reader (Carillon, 1979, St. Paul), 33.