51 Facts About Francis Spellman

Francis Joseph Spellman was an American Catholic prelate who served as Archbishop of New York from 1939 until his death in 1967.

From 1932 to 1939, Spellman served as an auxiliary bishop of the Archdiocese of Boston.

Francis Spellman was created a cardinal by Pope Pius XII in 1946.

Francis Spellman was born on May 4,1889, in Whitman, Massachusetts, to William Spellman and Ellen Spellman.

William Francis Spellman was a grocer whose own parents had immigrated to the United States from Clonmel and Leighlinbridge, Ireland.

Francis Spellman had two younger brothers, Martin and John, and two younger sisters, Marian and Helene.

Francis Spellman attended Whitman High School, a public school, because there was no Catholic school in Whitman.

Francis Spellman enjoyed photography and baseball; he played first base during his freshman year of high school until suffering a hand injury.

Francis Spellman graduated in 1911 and decided to study for the priesthood.

Francis Spellman suffered so badly from pneumonia that the college administrators wanted to send him home to recover.

Francis Spellman refused to leave and eventually completed his theological studies.

Francis Spellman was ordained a priest at the Sant'Apollinare Basilica in Rome by Patriarch Giuseppe Ceppetelli on May 14,1916.

O'Connell eventually assigned Francis Spellman to promote subscriptions for the archdiocesan newspaper, The Pilot.

Francis Spellman translated Pius XI's first broadcast over Vatican Radio into English in 1931.

Later in 1931, with the fascist government of Benito Mussolini in power in Italy, Francis Spellman secretly transported a papal encyclical, Non abbiamo bisogno, that condemned fascism, out of Rome to Paris for publication.

Francis Spellman served as secretary to Cardinal Lorenzo Lauri at the 1932 International Eucharistic Congress in Dublin, and helped reform the Vatican's press office, introducing mimeograph machines and issuing press releases.

On July 30,1932, Francis Spellman was appointed as an auxiliary bishop of Boston and titular bishop of Sila by Pope Pius XI.

Francis Spellman received his consecration on September 8,1932, from Pacelli at St Peter's Basilica in Rome.

Francis Spellman was the first American to be consecrated a bishop at St Peter's.

Borgongini-Duca designed a coat of arms for Francis Spellman that incorporated Christopher Columbus's ship the Santa Maria.

When Francis Spellman's mother died in 1935, Massachusetts Governor James Curley, Lieutenant Governor Joseph Hurley, and many members of the clergy, with the exception of O'Connell, attended the funeral.

Francis Spellman arranged and attended the meeting with Pacelli and Roosevelt at Springwood, the Roosevelt estate in Hyde Park, New York.

Francis Spellman became an early friend of Joseph Kennedy Sr, the US ambassador to the United Kingdom and the head of a rich Catholic family.

On Pacelli's trip to the United States, he, Kennedy, and Francis Spellman attempted to stop the vitriolic radio broadcasts of Reverend Charles Coughlin.

Francis Spellman was installed as archbishop on May 23,1939.

Francis Spellman was painted twice in 1940 and again in 1941 by the artist Adolfo Muller-Ury.

Francis Spellman inaugurated the first regularly scheduled Spanish-language masses in the archdiocese at St Cecilia's Parish in East Harlem.

In 1945, Francis Spellman instituted the Al Smith Dinner in Manhattan, an annual white tie fundraiser for Catholic Charities that is attended by prominent national figures.

In 1949, when gravediggers at Calvary Cemetery in Queens went on strike for a pay raise, Francis Spellman accused them of being Communists and recruited seminarians of the Archdiocese from St Joseph's Seminary as strikebreakers.

Francis Spellman canceled Sheen's annual Good Friday sermons at St Patrick's Cathedral and discouraged clergy from befriending the Bishop.

Francis Spellman sent priests overseas to study Spanish, and by 1960, a quarter of the archdiocese's parishes had an outreach to Spanish-speaking Catholics.

Francis Spellman visited Ecuador, where he founded three schools: Cardinal Spellman High School and Cardinal Spellman Girls' School, both in Quito, and Cardinal Spellman High School in Guayaquil.

Francis Spellman attended the Second Vatican Council from 1962 to 1965 and sat on its board of presidency.

Francis Spellman believed that the Vatican was appointing predominantly liberal clergymen to the council's commissions.

Francis Spellman led his archdiocese through an extensive period of building Catholic infrastructure, particularly churches, schools, and hospitals.

Francis Spellman consolidated all parish building programs into his own hands and thereby received better interest rates from bankers.

In 1966, Francis Spellman offered his resignation to Paul VI after the latter instituted a policy requiring bishops to retire at age 75, but Paul asked him to remain in his post.

Francis Spellman died in New York City on December 2,1967, at age 78.

Francis Spellman was interred in the crypt under the main altar at St Patrick's Cathedral.

For years rumors abounded about Cardinal Francis Spellman being a homosexual.

Francis Spellman funded the trip by a group of New York priests and religious sisters to the 1965 Selma to Montgomery marches.

Francis Spellman opposed racial discrimination in public housing but the social activism of such priests as Daniel Berrigan and his brother Philip Berrigan, as well as a young Melkite priest, David Kirk.

Francis Spellman once said "a true American can neither be a Communist nor a Communist condoner" and "the first loyalty of every American is vigilantly to weed out and counteract Communism and convert American Communists to Americanism".

Francis Spellman defended Senator Joseph McCarthy's 1953 investigations of alleged Communist subversives in the federal government.

The illustrator Edward Sorel designed a poster in 1967, Pass the Lord and Praise the Ammunition, showing Francis Spellman carrying a rifle with a bayonet.

The poster was never distributed because Francis Spellman died right after its printing.

Francis Spellman denounced the efforts of US Representative Graham Arthur Barden to provide federal funding only to public schools as "a craven crusade of religious prejudice against Catholic children".

Francis Spellman engaged in a heated public dispute in 1949 with former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt when she expressed her opposition to federal funding to parochial schools in her column My Day.

Francis Spellman eventually met with Roosevelt at Hyde Park to settle their dispute.

When Democratic Senator John F Kennedy ran for president in the 1960 presidential election, Spellman endorsed his Republican opponent, Vice President Richard Nixon, a non-Catholic.

Francis Spellman's enduring accomplishments were his personal acts of kindness toward individuals and the religious and charitable institutions he founded or strengthened.