Roman Catholics: Requiem for a Cardinal

Francis Cardinal Spellman once said that he wanted only to have the fu neral of a simple priest. The Roman Catholic Church, however, is not inclined to honor its spiritual princes with the trappings of humility. His funeral last week — seen by millions on television — was the nation’s most impressive since that of John Kennedy.

During the five days that Spellman’s body lay in state in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers filed past the catafalque in tribute. For the funeral service, the cathedral was jammed to capacity. Both President Johnson and Vice President Humphrey were on hand, making one of their rare joint public appearances.

So were Senators Robert Kennedy and Jacob Javits, Governor Nelson Rocke feller, New York City Mayor John Lind say, U.N. Ambassador Arthur Goldberg and a delegation of Senators from South Viet Nam, a nation to which Spellman had a special devotion.

Ecumenism & English. Although a personal friend to clerics of many faiths, Spellman was, at best, a reluctant ecumenist. Nonetheless more than 100 Catholic bishops and almost 50 Protestant, Orthodox and Jewish clerics were present at the cathedral. Among them was Archbishop lakovos, Orthodox primate of North and South America, who was invited to sit on an elevated, canopied throne in the sanctuary. It was the first time that an Orthodox prelate had been so honored in New York.

Spellman throughout his life had a love for Catholicism’s old Latin liturgy. The requiem that honored his death was as up-to-date as the church allowed.The funeral Mass — concelebrated by nine cardinals, two archbishops, seven bishops and one priest*— was conducted entirely in English, in accordance with recent reforms of the postconciliar church. The predominant liturgical color of the service was penitential purple rather than funeral black —reflecting the tone, attuned more toward hope than sadness or mourning, of modern Catholic funerals. Notably absent from the service was the beautiful but chilling sequence Dies I me:

A day of wrath That day will be. It will dissolve the world Into glowing ashes.

Also missing from the ceremony were several gloomy prayers warning of the fearful judgment awaiting the departed in the afterlife.

Not With It. There was also a succinctly honest and even witty tone to the eulogy by Jesuit Father Robert Gannon, president emeritus of Fordham University and author of Spellman’s biography. “In life, our cardinal archbishop did not look like the great man that he was,” said Father Gannon. “He was never a great scholar, or a great orator, or a great writer either. He spent his life doing things for God, for his country and his neighbor that only a great man could do.”

“Criticism of a man in his position was inevitable,” added Gannon. “He wasn’t fast enough, he wasn’t loud enough, he wasn’t relevant. To use a wonderful word, he wasn’t with it. Well, what is ‘it’? Why, ‘it’ is what you’re with. And that represents the thinking that is going around us today, even in the church. He found himself, as so many do in these disintegrating times, between two warring factions: one holding that everything new is bad, and the other that nothing old can be trusted. No one who keeps to the golden mean can please them all.”

*Spellman’s nephew, the Rev. John J. Peg-nam, a Navy chaplain who has been on a ship stationed off South Viet Nam.