Editor’s note: This is part of a series profiling great American Catholics ahead of the July 4 celebration of the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
Many cardinals have had books written about them, but few have become the fictionalized heroes of best-selling novels. Cardinal Francis J. Spellman, archbishop of New York from 1939 to 1967, was one – possibly the only one.
The novel was called “The Cardinal.” The work of Catholic author Henry Morton Robinson, it topped the best-seller list for many months after its publication in 1950. Later it was made into a movie.
With many embellishments, the story mirrored the real-life career of Cardinal Spellman – hard-fought climb to the top of the hierarchical ladder, trusted adviser to a pope and a president, behind-the-scenes unofficial diplomat engaged in sensitive wartime missions.
When Time magazine, marking his elevation to cardinal, featured his cherubic features on the cover of its Feb. 25, 1946, issue, the artist situated the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica and a spire of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in the background.
They might have tossed in the White House, too – for Cardinal Spellman embodied the fusion of Americanism and Catholicism.
Roots of faith
Francis Joseph Spellman was born May 4, 1889, in Whitman, Massachusetts, the oldest of five children of William and Ellen Conway Spellman. Young Francis attended the local high school, where he was manager of the baseball team, and Fordham University in New York, graduating in 1911.
By then he’d decided to become a priest. As a seminarian of the Boston archdiocese, he studied at the Urban College in Rome, exhibiting a talent for cultivating friendships with men who would rise to high positions in the Roman Curia.
Ordained a priest in 1916, he returned to Boston. There he appears to have had a falling-out with Cardinal William O’Connell, who ruled the archdiocese with an iron hand. Father Spellman spent the next several years in a series of temporary assignments.
The church’s James Bond
Even so, he kept up his Roman contacts. The breakthrough came in 1925, when he accompanied a pilgrimage group to Rome. There he secured a post in the Vatican Secretariat of State.
He also made friends with American Catholics Count Enrico Galeazzi, a Vatican insider, and Archbishop Eugenio Pacelli.
When Pope Pius XI in 1931 issued an encyclical critical of Benito Mussolini’s fascist regime, the fascists wouldn’t allow its publication in Italy. Father Spellman’s superiors assigned the young American priest to smuggle the document to Paris.
In 1932, Father Spellman was named auxiliary bishop of Boston and ordained in St. Peter’s by newly appointed Cardinal Pacelli. While he was a hero in Rome, it was a different story in Boston. Cardinal O’Connell sent him to a parish with as little public visibility as possible.
But Bishop Spellman was not easily thwarted. With funding from his friend, Boston multi-millionaire Joseph P. Kennedy, he organized a 1936 U.S. visit by Cardinal Pacelli. A high point of the trip was a meeting between the cardinal and President Franklin Roosevelt.
Cardinal Pacelli soon became Pope Pius XII and appointed Spellman archbishop of New York.
Advisor to presidents and popes
As the world plunged into war and the United States edged toward entering the conflict, Roosevelt turned to Archbishop Spellman as an adviser on Catholic affairs. At the end of 1939, Pope Pius XII named him to the post of Military Vicar.
In January 1943, Archbishop Spellman prepared for the first of what would be a series of annual trips to visit servicemen overseas. Roosevelt gave him an additional mission whose nature became clear when on Feb. 12 he met with Spanish dictator Francisco Franco. The session was credited with helping ensure Spanish neutrality during the war.
During this remarkable trip, Archbishop Spellman lunched with Winston Churchill in London. In Rome, he appears to have met with high-ranking officials. In Istanbul, he made the acquaintance of Archbishop Angelo Roncalli – later, Pope St. John XXIII. Returning to the United States, he urged Roosevelt to treat Rome as an “open city” and refrain from bombing it – a plea that had only partial success.
During the war, Pope Pius named no new cardinals, but it was no surprise when Archbishop Spellman was part of the first post-war class, elevated to the College of Cardinals on Feb. 18, 1946.
In the years that followed, Cardinal Spellman was a champion of anti-communism. At the Second Vatican Council, he supported ecumenism and strongly backed Vatican II’s endorsement of religious liberty.
He died in New York on Dec. 2, 1967.
— Russell Shaw, OSV News
Editor’s note: This is part of a series profiling great American Catholics ahead of the July 4, 2026, celebration of the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
Catholic writer Flannery O’Connor shares the steps with one of her pet peacocks in an undated photo. This Southern writer’s Catholic faith shaped her vision of a world that often ignores goodness. (Floyd Jillson/Atlanta Journal-Constition | OSV News)Flannery O’Connor was not an evangelist. She was an artist, one of the most gifted American fiction writers of the 20th century. But a profoundly Catholic theological vision informs her art, giving her stories resonance and depth that sound deep – and sometimes deeply disturbing – spiritual chords.
Explaining why she often wrote about grotesque characters in bizarre situations, O’Connor remarked that in an age of disbelief like this one, “You have to make your vision apparent by shock – to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost blind you draw large and startling figures.”
She said, “All my stories are about the action of grace on a character who is not very willing to support it.” Then, with her characteristic mixture of ruefulness and realism, she added, “But most people think of these stories as hard, hopeless, brutal, etc.”
Today, more than six decades after her death, that sort of reaction to O’Connor’s fiction is more and more giving way to the realization that these are richly imagined analogies of faith flung in the face of skeptical secularism by a master storyteller.
A foundation of faith
Writing in the New York Review of Books, author Joyce Carol Oates cited O’Connor’s “unshakable absolutist faith” as the foundation of her creative work. Faith, said Oates, provided O’Connor with “a rationale with which to mock both her secular and bigoted Christian contemporaries in a succession of brilliantly orchestrated short stories that read like parables of human folly confronted by mortality.”
The only child of a real estate agent named Edward F. O’Connor and Regina Cline O’Connor, Mary Flannery O’Connor was born March 25, 1925, in Savannah, Georgia. Her great-grandparents were Irish immigrants, and the family had remained staunchly Catholic, members of a religious minority in the Protestant Bible Belt. As a child, Mary Flannery attended parochial schools until her father’s failing health forced a move to the Cline family home in Milledgeville, Georgia. There she attended Peabody High School, drawing cartoons and writing for the school paper.
In 1942, she entered Georgia State College for Women,near her home. It was then she began to use the name Flannery O’Connor on school assignments. She graduated with a degree in social science.
In 1946, she was accepted by the prestigious Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa and went there to study journalism. In 1950 she was diagnosed with lupus, an inflammatory connective tissue disease that had killed her father.
A Christian view of the world
Her first novel, “Wise Blood,” appeared in 1952 and received respectful but sometimes puzzled reviews. The story, she later said is about a “Protestant saint, written from the point of view of a Catholic.”
Her short fiction was collected in two volumes, “A Good Man Is Hard To Find” (1952) and the posthumously published “Everything That Rises Must Converge” (1965).
The unraveling of hypocrisy is a favorite theme and a story called “Revelation” is a striking example of that. Beyond mere hypocrisy, O’Connor sometimes confronted monstrous evil.
“The novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him, and his problem will be to make these appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural.”
In 1960, the Dominican Servants of Relief for Incurable Cancer approached O’Connor to write a book about a girl with a facial tumor whom the sisters had sheltered until her death at the age of 12. O’Connor wrote the introduction, which is an extraordinary testimony of faith.
“One of the tendencies of our age is to use the suffering of children to discredit the goodness of God,” she wrote, “and once you have discredited His goodness, you are done with Him.” In earlier times, people viewed unmerited suffering with “the blind, prophetical, unsentimental eye of acceptance, which is to say, of faith.” But now “we govern by tenderness” – tenderness divorced from its source in Christ – which “ends in forced labor camps and in the fumes of the gas chamber.”
O’Connor died of kidney failure on Aug. 3, 1964. “The Complete Stories of Flannery O’Connor” received the National Book Award for Fiction in 1972.
— Russell Shaw, OSV News
Learn more
St. Matthew Church invites book lovers to attend a six-week series, “Peculiar Crossroads: An Introduction to Flannery O’Connor’s Life and Her Works.” The series is open to anyone interested in gleaning timeless and timely spiritual insights from one of America’s most celebrated fiction writers, who was also fiercely Catholic.
Explore O’Connor’s short stories, essays and letters with expert guest speakers and discussion. Sessions will be held from 7 to 8:30 p.m. on Tuesdays, April 28 to June 9 in the New Life Center Banquet Room.
Visit www.stmatthewcatholic.org/adultfaithformation to register. Organizers recommend buying “O’Connor Collected Works,” the textbook for the series.