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The Cardinal's Legacy
You could say he had the second-toughest job in the Catholic Church.

By Vincent Cannato, adjunct fellow, Hudson Institute, and author of John Lindsay’s New York and the Crisis of Liberalism, forthcoming from Basic Books.

t has often been said that being Mayor of New York City is the second toughest job in the country. A case could also be made that being archbishop of the New York archdiocese is the second toughest job in the Roman Catholic Church. The sad occasion of Cardinal John O’Connor’s death yesterday reminds us of the pivotal role that New York’s Catholic archbishop plays in the politics and culture of New York City. Along with Archbishop John Hughes and Cardinal Francis Spellman, O’Connor stands as one of the most influential leaders of the history of the New York archdiocese.

Archbishop Hughes, who led New York’s Catholics during the 1840s and 1850s, represented the Catholic Church of the poor Irish immigrants. His was a feisty, defensive Church. It fought to protect its churches and congregations from nativist Protestant mobs and defended the rights of the lowly Irish laborers. Hughes helped create the city’s parochial school system, in opposition to what Catholics believed was the Protestant proselytizing of the local schools. Hughes also oversaw the construction of St. Patrick’s Church on Fifth Avenue, bringing these unruly Papists to the street of the fashionable mansions of the city’s elite. Hughes was the living nightmare of anti-Catholic nativists, but he turned the position of archbishop of New York into a political force.

If Hughes led a Catholic Church of immigrant outsiders eager survive and succeed in New York, Cardinal Spellman, one hundred years later, led an ascendant Church comfortable in its political control and newfound affluence. Post-war New York was an era of Catholic ascendancy and Spellman perfectly embodied this trend. Nativism and anti-Catholicism had retreated. The children and grandchildren of Irish, German, and Italian immigrants had now taken their place in the city. Spellman had access to Presidents and Governors. It was said that New York Mayors routinely sought his advice on personnel and policy decisions. Spellman began the annual Al Smith Dinner, which has become a political landmark in the city. He blended Catholic theology with American patriotism and anti-Communism, in ways unthinkable to Hughes. New York’s Catholics had finally arrived.

Spellman, who died in 1968, lived long enough to see the changes of Vatican II and the beginning of the social upheavals of the 1960s. By 1984, when O’Connor was named archbishop of New York, it was no longer Spellman’s city. Catholics were still a powerful political force in the city, but the Church seemed out of step — political, socially, and theologically — with the times. What was needed was not the muscular Catholicism of Hughes and Spellman, but a more politically astute archbishop. Throughout his sixteen years as archbishop, Cardinal O’Connor successfully navigated the waters of a changing Catholic Church and a changing city. Though not a native New Yorker, O’Connor quickly took to both the city and the job. A theological conservative who was extremely loyal to Pope John Paul II, O’Connor operated in an increasingly liberal and libertine city where the power of the city’s white ethnic Irish, Germans, and Italians was giving way to what former Mayor David Dinkins called the “gorgeous mosaic.” Yet O’Connor’s tenure won him the love and admiration of his Catholic flock, unlikely friends like former Mayor Ed Koch, and the grudging respect of many of his adversaries.

Politically, O’Connor was a mixed bag. A former Navy chaplain, he signed the National Conference of Catholic Bishops’ controversial pastoral letter on peace and nuclear weapons; a cultural conservative and outspoken opponent of abortion, he took liberal positions on welfare reform and the death penalty. When AIDS hit the city hard, the Cardinal balanced his conservative views on homosexuality with compassion for the sick. When Geraldine Ferraro and Mario Cuomo tried to convince New Yorkers that one could be a pro-choice Catholic, O’Connor took the opportunity to remind everyone that Catholics could not pick and choose which Church teachings they would obey. When four New York City policemen shot Amadou Diallo, O’Connor carefully expressed sympathy for the victim without bashing the predominantly Catholic police force. In a city with a large Jewish population, O’Connor adeptly reached out to the Jewish community and forcefully condemned anti-Semitism.

In our “separation-of-church-and-state” age, it might discomfort some that a religious figure like O’Connor had such influence. Not only were O’Connor’s Sunday masses standing-room-only, but his homilies often made the local Sunday night television news and the Monday papers. Though technically his flock consisted of Manhattan, the Bronx, Staten Island, and seven suburban New York counties, O’Connor really spoke for all New York Catholics. (Brooklyn and Queens are part of the separate Brooklyn archdiocese.) Politicians were eager for O’Connor’s ear. When Governor George W. Bush wanted to make amends for his appearance at Bob Jones University, he did it in a letter to Cardinal O’Connor

What of the future? While New York’s Catholics are no longer the outsiders of the Hughes era, they are no longer as powerful as in Spellman’s day. O’Connor’s replacement will need to minister to over 2 million Catholics in a city where anti-Catholic sentiment among elites is a growing reality, where increasing numbers of the city’s Catholics are immigrants from Latin America and Asia, and where many native-born Catholics question the relevance of the Church to their daily lives. It was O’Connor’s strength that he recognized these changes, while articulating a Catholic theology in stride with Pope John Paul’s vision. New Yorkers will be lucky to find another archbishop with O’Connor’s combination of political acumen, pastoral influence, and personal warmth. He will be missed.

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