Two Roads to Rome

...16.95...

...They are optimistic, not despairing, because the Church's message is ultimately hopeful, "comic...

...He waged a campaign to oust Bertrand Russell from a professorship at City College...

...The man who led the New York archdiocese for almost 30 years, the last20 of them as a cardinal, was more a businessman than a priest, an entrepreneur in a cassock...

...He wrote in his diary one day: "Holy Father asked me for three autos...

...Soon Spellman, who apparently rarely failed, was promoted to monsignor, and in 1932 he returned to Boston as a bishop...

...The hierarchy is unlikely to embrace the authors' recommendations to liberalize the Church's positions on birth control and divorce, or to allow the ordination of women...

...Depending on which page of Cooney one believes, the diocese was either $26 million or $46 million in debt...

...Greeley and Durkin have undertaken a daunting task...

...True Catholics, the authors argue, see God as richly present in the world...

...A friend of J. Edgar Hoover and a supporter of Joe McCarthy until the end, he was the most primitive kind of anti-Communist, one who seriously subscribed to the Mickey Spillane school of national security, as set forth in a Mike Hammer novel he urged on his priests: "Don't arrest them, don't treat them with the dignity of the democratic process of the courts of law...

...Cooney, no admirer of his subject, writes: "Indisputably, he did more for the Church than all the rest of the American hierarchy combined...

...His next opportunity came in 1938, when New York's Cardinal Hayes died...

...Steel, Westinghouse, General Electric, and General Motors, and if you were asked to pick a president of that merged corporation—and he was not a priest—I'd suggest Francis Spellman...

...Just as significantly, he opposed the White House bid of JFK, a self-confident, cosmopolitan Irishman and an altogether different model for American Catholics...

...But if you reject the heritage because of the flawed way it is lived, realize that you are using an inappropriate criterion...

...He quickly demonstrated the talents that would ultimately make him the "American Pope" —a limitless capacity for work, a knack for befriending the powerful, an instinct for public relations, and, probably most important of all, an ability to raise money...

...Spellman, who knew he could keep the money flowing by playing on Irish defensiveness, rarely missed an opportunity to accuse an enemy of bigotry...

...The U.S...

...One product of the new questioning mood is a genial book by America's best-known priest, Andrew M. Greeley, and his sister, Mary Greeley Durkin, entitled How to Save the Catholic Church (Viking, 258 pp...

...Church, and wondering whether another Spellman is possible in the future, will have to seek elsewhere...

...Church income rose...

...Greeley and Durkin are presenting their ideal...

...Writers & Writing TWO ROADS TO ROME BY BARRY GEWEN It would be a mistake to read John Cooney's The A merican Pope: The Life and Times of Francis Cardinal Spell-man (Times Books, 364 pp., $19.95) as the story of a famous churchman...

...Although Spellman wasn't in line for the job of running America's most important archdiocese—he was slated to be O' Connell's successor in New England—luck intervened: Pope Pius XI passed away before he could fill the post, and was succeeded by Eugenio Cardinal Pacelli, a close friend of Spellman, as Pius XII...

...Their strategy, therefore, is to define what they believe to be Catholicism's basic sensibility—as against its religious doctrine—and to follow with some suggestions for policy...

...Just bomb them...

...Treat 'em to the inglorious taste of sudden death...

...Significantly, the height of his career bridged the Presidential candidacies of Alfred E. Smith and John F. Kennedy...

...To those who might blink their eyes at all this, recalling either their own experiences with repressive nuns and authoritarian priests, or their knowledge of history's Indexes and Inquisitions, Greeley and Durkin respond that what has often passed for Catholicism is simply a corruption of it...

...Cooney does not make clear why this ambitious albeit intellectually undistinguished small-town Irish boy chose the cloth...

...Relying on the advice of corporate friends such as Joseph Kennedy, Spellman speculated in stocks and real estate...

...Indeed, Cooney could as easily be reporting on the life of, say, Avco Corporation's CEO or the head of Beatrice Foods—except that Spellman's company was bigger and more powerful...

...Cooney provides information, not analysis, all "life," no "times...

...his book ends abruptly with the Cardinal's death...

...Though the Irish were becoming established and frequently rich, assimilating themselves into U.S...

...Yet those wishing to understand how an essentially philistine businessman could rise to the pinnacle of the U.S...

...They are communal, nurturing, tolerant, pro-art, pro-intellect, pro-emotion, pro-sex, even proenvironmentalism...

...In the lethargic atmosphere of the Holy See's State Department Spellman blossomed...

...Perceiving that American Catholicism requires serious revitalization, they also recognize that genuine renewal can be achieved only through a spirit of voluntarism: A reliance on monolithic authority, the clergy's traditional stance, will either send more people fleeing from the churches or produce an institution that is an empty shell...

...The Vatican of the 1920s was nearly bankrupt, yet Spellman was able to obtain limousines for his superiors by swapping favors with wealthy American Catholics eager for the attentions of high Church officials...

...The Cardinal was tyrannical, bureaucratic, petty, vindictive, anti-intellectual ("I hire theologians"), and parochial...

...He tried to have movies he had not seen closed because they were supposedly sacrilegious...

...He does show that while at the Vatican Spellman knew enough to use what he had—an outstanding memory and an eye for the main chance—to cultivate the right people...

...do the same thing they'd do to you...

...If Catholicism's past can be said to be personified by the Cardinal Spellman of The American Pope, its future may well be captured by the warm pluralism and pragmatism of How to Save the Catholic Church...

...But his charms were not obvious to his first and only American boss, Boston's imperious Cardinal O' Connell...

...After the Pope attempted a peace initiative between Washington and Hanoi, Spellman dug up the cretinous and possibly heretical declaration: "My country, may it always be right [but] right or wrong, my country...

...The American Church cannot expect to remain a relevant institution by relying on rigid formulas that large portions of the laity reject...

...Another obstacle confronting any Spellman redi-vivus is the liberalization initiated by John XXIII through the Second Vatican Council("He's no Pope," Spellman said, "he should be selling bananas...

...Yet Greeley and Durkin would seem to have logic on their side...

...These achievements had their underside, of course...

...Even from the facts, however, it is apparent that Spellman was in many ways a period piece...

...Once again, Spellman threw himself into his work with spectacular results...

...In 1939, New York's new archbishop arrived from Boston...

...and one can merely try to imagine what its reaction will be to the proposal that "the Church must encourage its members to become better lovers—more playful, more passionate, more skillful...

...If, as has been suggested, New York's recently appointed archbishop, John J. O'Connor, is aspiring to Spellman's power, he will have to overcome both the greater sophistication and ethnic heterogeneity of his flock and the Kennedy legacy...

...Skeptics who would refute them by focusing on the Church's worldly failings are missing the point...

...One New York politico remarked: "If there was a merger of AT&T, U.S...

...He became banker to his own priests, borrowing money at 2 per cent, then relending it to the parishes at 2.5 per cent...

...And alittle later: "Holy Father asked me to get him a train...

...Putting in 16-hour days, the Archbishop proceeded to consolidate finances, tighten operations and pressure the banks to lower their interest rates...

...The eldest son of a prosperous Massachusetts grocer, Spellman, after graduating from Fordham in 1911, traveled to the North American College in Rome, where he was eventually ordained...

...He emerged in an era when American Catholicism—which in those years meant Irish-American Catholicism—was suffering from a lag of consciousness...

...His network of wealthy contributors came through for him, too...

...Before his death in 1967, Spellman was able to spend over a billion dollars on construction projects, building 37 churches, 130 schools, five hospitals, plus dozens of orphanages, old-age homes and the like...

...The archdiocese grew into New York City's largest landholder...

...in 1916 he had begun making the connections that would help him up the clerical ladder...

...When Lyndon Johnson asked Spellman's advice on Vietnam, the clergyman responded: "Bomb them...

...Church has hardly escaped the upheaval...

...Church expenses fell...

...society, they continued to bear wounds from the brutalizing prejudice and discrimination they suffered in the 19th century...

...Hans Kiing, the German theologian, makes a similar argument when he calls the Inquisition "un-Christian...

...Thus for nine years the self-promoting young priest was condemned to one demeaning position after another, until his Italian friends came to his rescue in 1925 by landing him a translator's j ob at the Vatican...

...Criticize the practitioners of a heritage, if you will, in the name of their failures to live up to the heritage...

...By the time here turned to the U.S...

...Ever since Vatican II, Catholicism worldwide has been in healthy ferment, and the U.S...

...There are enough of these atrocity stories in The American Pope to satisfy any masochistic reader looking to take offense...

...Church leadership is subjected to continual pum-meling in these pages as doctrinaire, cowardly, misogynistic, foolish, hidebound...

...It's a fair contention...