Religion: Old Convert

Bob Wagner was getting old. He would be 69 in June, and he often felt unwell. Colleagues in the U.S. Senate had noted that the author of the National Labor Relations Act and many another piece of New Deal social legislation appeared less often in the seat that had been his for nearly 20 years. For New York’s senior Senator, Democratic Robert Ferdinand Wagner, the time had come to take a significant religious step.

Last week, seated in a wheel chair in Manhattan’s Lenox Hill Hospital, where he was recovering from influenza, bull-necked Bob Wagner was baptized in the faith of Rome by Msgr. Robert F. Keegan, director of the New York archdiocese’s Catholic Charities. Though born a Lutheran (in Nastatten, Germany) and raised in the U.S. a Methodist, Senator Wagner’s conversion occasioned no surprise. His wife, who died in 1919, was a Catholic; his son, Robert Jr. was brought up as a Catholic. Obviously, Convert Wagner had been considering the move for some time. Said Msgr. Keegan’s assistant after the ceremony: “He told me that he and Al Smith had talked about it before Al died, and that he had told Al that he would become a Catholic.”