John Cooney
Autor(a) de The American Pope: The Life and Times of Francis Cardinal Spellman
About the Author
John Cooney is Director of the annual Humbert Summer School, which promotes Irish studies.
Obras de John Cooney
Etiquetado
Conhecimento Comum
- Nome padrão
- Cooney, John
- Sexo
- male
- Nacionalidade
- UK
- Educação
- University of Glasgow
- Ocupação
- journalist
- Organizações
- Irish Independent
- Pequena biografia
- John Cooney is currently the Religious Affairs Correspondent with the Irish Independent newspaper and is the Ireland correspondent with The Tablet. He formerly worked with the Irish Times.
Membros
Resenhas
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Estatísticas
- Obras
- 10
- Membros
- 173
- Popularidade
- #123,688
- Avaliação
- 3.3
- Resenhas
- 3
- ISBNs
- 22
- Idiomas
- 1
Pius XII and Spellman both wanted a return to the Church of the Middle Ages, when there was little distinction between ecclesiastical and secular power. King Pepin the Short, in 756, had ceded enormous land holdings to the Church, providing enormous resources. Gradually, the state struggled to regain its lost authority and was aided by the immense corruption which led to the Reformation. By the late 19th century, virtually all its secular power was gone, and church leaders began a movement to enthrone the Pope as the world's great moral leader. The Vatican Council of 1870 which defined the Pope's infallibility was an important part of this maneuver.
Thus Spellman, who attended seminary in Rome in 1911, was a part of the the Church's redefinition movement. Americans, traditionally not having a state church, could not appreciate how the intertwining of secular and religious power could be to the detriment of both. Spellman was untroubled by this commingling and intimately studied how the ways of the Vatican could be used to obtain power.
As Archbishop of New York, he was an outstanding administrator, reorganizing a decentralized parish financial system that New York bankers had long taken advantage of. Between 1954 and 1959 he personally controlled over $168 million in building projects.
Business did not always go smoothly with the Vatican. Often Spellman felt it necessary to prove American Catholicism was purer than Rome's. An example was the flap over the movie The Miracle, which had been seen and widely praised in Rome. Spellman, who had not seen the movie, decided it was perverted, and led a vicious campaign to have the movie's license withdrawn. Perhaps his ambivalence about his own sexuality (he was widely assumed to be homosexual) led to his overreaction to a film that treated sexuality with some frankness. His campaign backfired, of course, as these things usually do. The film, which had been doing quite poorly, now began playing to packed houses, and the suit that Spellman brought ultimately led to the seminal decision by the Supreme Court essentially declaring that blasphemy was not a crime. Justice Frankfurter wrote in the decision, "Blasphemy was the chameleon phrase which meant the criticism of whatever the ruling authority of the moment established as orthodox doctrine."
His decline began shortly before Pius' death, when the Pope discovered that Spellman had been trying to extort funds from the Propagation of the Faith, an agency Spellman controlled, but which was under the direction of Bishop Sheen, a bitter enemy. When Sheen finally managed to get the case before the Pope, Spellman made the mistake of lying about his role and was easily proved incorrect. The Pope was not a happy camper.
Then Pius died, and with the ascendancy of John XXIII, who emphasized the pastoral role of his bishops rather than the administrative, Spellman's decline became precipitous. He had also worked diligently against the election of Kennedy, arguing that a Catholic in the White House would work against Catholics, who would no longer be able to use the "we're victims of persecution and bigotry" ploy to squeeze federal funds for parochial schools. Kennedy himself was not sympathetic and in fact did everything possible to maintain a large chasm between church and state. His election meant a further decline in Spellman's power.
This is a fascinating biography of an important figure in 20th century politics.… (mais)