Religion: Spellman to New York

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Seven years ago, tall Eugenic Cardinal Pacelli, Papal Secretary of State, laid his lean hands upon the round head of a plump U. S. priest, made him the first U. S. Roman Catholic bishop ever consecrated in St. Peter's Basilica. The bishop was Most Rev. Francis Joseph Spellman, whom the Pope had appointed Auxiliary to William Henry Cardinal O'Connell of Boston. This week Eugenio Pacelli, now Pope Pius XII, appointed Bishop Spellman to be Archbishop of the 1,000,000-odd Catholics of the see of New York, vacant since last September.

A graduate of Fordham University, trained for the priesthood in Rome's North American College—the alma mater of many a member of the U. S. hierarchy—Father Spellman was made an assistant to the Papal Secretary of State in 1925, thereafter became one of the Vatican's most useful U. S. prelates. He it was who rebroadcast in English the late Pope's first radio speech. He it was who, in 1931, smuggled out of Italy, by airplane, an anti-Fascist papal encyclical which was in danger of being suppressed. When the present Pope visited the U. S. in 1936, no prelate was more in his company than Bishop Spellman.

When Bishop Spellman returned to Boston, near which he was born and, as a grocer's boy, played sandlot baseball, observers predicted for him an archbishopric and a Cardinal's red hat. Last week New York's genial Archbishop-elect, about to turn 50, had fulfilled one prediction, seemed sure to fulfill the other.