Spellman, Francis Joseph (1889–1967)

Archbishop of New York, Military Vicariate

Francis Joseph Spellman served as the Roman Catholic archbishop of New York and archbishop of the American military, a post known as the military vicariate, from 1939 to 1967. He played an outsized role in American diplomatic and military affairs due to his close friendships with Pope Pius XII, several American presidents, and many generals and admirals.

Born the son of a prosperous, small-town grocer, Spellman was educated at Fordham College in New York and North American College seminary in Rome, and was ordained as a priest in 1916. Spellman befriended his powerful seminary professors, who doubled as Vatican Curia officials. While Spellman outwardly conformed to the Curia's wishes, inwardly he was an American nationalist, who resented what he perceived as European condescension toward Americans. The future cardinal decided early to favor his country over his church whenever obligations to the two powers conflicted.

Unaware of his American politics, Spellman's Curial friends sped him up the ecclesiastical ladder. He was appointed both chancellor and auxiliary bishop for the Boston Archdiocese in 1922 and 1932, respectively. More importantly, from 1925 to 1932, he was the first American cleric to serve the Curia. There he befriended Vatican Secretary of State, Eugenio Cardinal Pacelli, the future Pius XII. Pacelli, who usually regarded Americans as naïve children, respected Spellman as his American counterpart. Both hated communism, especially as incarnated in the Soviet Union. Spellman lived up to Pacelli's high expectations; he excelled at Vatican secret diplomacy while Mussolini, Stalin, and Hitler extended their grasp over Europe. In 1931 he even smuggled Pope Piux XI's anti-Fascist encyclical out of Rome to Paris for publication, despite being shot at by Mussolini's police.

Spellman's 1932 return to Boston increased his power. Cardinal Pacelli made his favorite American the Vatican's gobetween to newly elected Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt; this, indeed, made Spellman the Vatican's primary representative in the United States. President Roosevelt consulted Spellman on many matters concerning American Catholic voters and the Vatican hierarchy. Ironically, the politically conservative Spellman detested Roosevelt's policies on the Soviet Union, the economy, labor, race, and education. Yet this odd couple plotted together on the president's reelection strategies; the personal politics of Spellman's fellow prelates; and American foreign policy positions toward Germany, Italy, Japan, and the Soviet Union. When Pacelli became pope in 1939, he elevated Spellman to the dominant American see: the archbishopric of New York. This office [Page 800]also included the military vicariate, the Roman Catholic chaplaincy to America's armed forces.

Contradictions underlay Spellman's life and work. His notorious love of luxury and his covert homosexuality seemed to stand in contrast to the passion he held for the military and his duties as military vicariate. Spellman also did not let his Christianity prevent him from embracing American militarism; he even became a strategic bombing enthusiast. He cherished high-level meetings with American admirals and generals. Gen. Albert Wedemeyer, the global strategist who formulated the American “Victory Plan,” which was used to help win World War II, described his friend and fellow Catholic with awe: “The military vicar was a very sophisticated military and political thinker. He thought in terms of what happened in one country in one part of the world and how it affected another on the other side of the world.”

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