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10 Works 173 Membros 3 Reviews

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

It's a fascinating study of power and politics. Spellman was not interested in theology -- at one time after the election of John XXIII, he is reported to have said, "I hire theologians" -- but he was enamored of authority and domination. At his peak he was in some ways more powerful than Pius XII, his friend and mentor, because of his position as head of the Catholic Church in New York, the most powerful diocese in the world after Rome. His banquets were de rigueur for politicians of all stripes, and he was noted for his extraordinary ability to raise huge sums of money. They either loved or hated him, but all paid him homage. He was a vicious anti-Communist who was close to Joseph McCarthy and J.Edgar Hoover (presumably not when he was cross-dressing -- see Anthony Summers new book). He eagerly helped the CIA throughout the world especially during the Vietnam War of which he was a vociferous proponent. Not everyone was pleased. William O. Douglas once said of him, "I came to know several Americans who I felt had greatly dishonored our American idea. One was Cardinal Spellman." (two others were Hoover and John Foster Dulles.)

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)
 
Marcado
ecw0647 | 1 outra resenha | Sep 30, 2013 |
Mix together the Milites Christi, a reactionary new order within the Catholic Church; a secret "Holy Force" that stops at nothing to achieve its ends; a Catholic priest who is an ex-Green Beret and CIA hit man aching to atone for years of massacre and violence in Vietnam; the Trinity, a group of three priests, of radical thought and origin, who are linked by some unforgivable sin committed while at seminary; and several gorgeous women who could shake any man's commitment to celibacy, and you have the basic ingredients of John Cooney's Acts of Contrition, a marvelous way to spend a rainy afternoon, built around the political intrigues of the Vatican. The story revolves around the conflict between the conservative Church, firmly rooted in 2000 years of tradition and history, slowly moving toward change, but challenged by rich and powerful men who try to create a church within the Church to wrest control from the current hierarchy so they can return to a time when the Church ruled the world.
Cooney is no stranger to those machinations. He is the author of American Pope: The Life and Times of Francis Cardinal Spellman, which naturally I had to locate and read also.
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Marcado
ecw0647 | Sep 30, 2013 |
1910 The American Pope: The Life and Times of Francis Cardinal Spellman, by John Cooney (read 22 Feb 1985) I hope I have just finished the worst book I'll read this year. It is an amateurish, simplistic, gossipy, illogical, poorly organized account of Cardinal Spellman. It is simply awful--it makes no sense, and everything is slanted against Cardinal Spellman. Obviously Cardinal Spellman had his defects, and I often disagreed with him, but this book simply says whatever he did was wrong, no matter what it was. I read the book just because I wanted to see how stupid a book could be.… (mais)
½
 
Marcado
Schmerguls | 1 outra resenha | Sep 4, 2008 |

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Estatísticas

Obras
10
Membros
173
Popularidade
#123,688
Avaliação
½ 3.3
Resenhas
3
ISBNs
22
Idiomas
1

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