Richard Cardinal Cushing, the archbishop of Boston, leading the flag-draped casket of President John F. Kennedy into St. Matthew’s Cathedral in Washington on November 25, 1963.
When I was a kid, I used to play my parents’ LP album “I Can Hear It Now / The Sixties,” a compilation of 1960s news events narrated by Walter Cronkite. Though John F. Kennedy was assassinated before I was born, I felt the drama of his death and burial in listening to the sounds of those fateful four days.
For some reason, one audio excerpt always stuck with me: the South Boston twang of Richard Cardinal Cushing, praying at the president’s graveside:
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen. Let us pray. O God, through whose mercy the souls of the faithful find rest, be pleased to bless this grave . . . that of our beloved Jack Kennedy, 35th President of the United States, that his soul may rejoice in Thee, with all the saints, through Christ our Lord. Amen.
Sixty years after JFK’s death, I’m writing a book about Cushing. As a subject, he’s something of a departure for me, given my past focus on intellectual history. Cushing wasn’t a scholar, though he appreciated academic expertise. Nor was he the smoothest public speaker, though he always left a memorable impression.
But more than any other American Catholic prelate of his day, he was an ecumenist and a pluralist. Throughout his career as archbishop of Boston, 1944 to 1970, he cultivated relationships with non-Catholics, speaking in Protestant churches, Jewish synagogues, and secular bastions like Harvard. His Catholicism was traditional and even zealous, but he preached it without the militancy that has come to characterize so much religion since. (His militant anti-communism is another story, revealing his complex entanglement in the politics of his time.)
To Cushing, Catholicism was one faith among many. While I’m sure he regarded it as the one true faith, he insisted it must be respectful of the nation’s pluralistic reality. It was fitting, then, that this pluralist prince of the church, the son of Irish immigrants, should preside at the first state funeral for a U.S. president that was also a Catholic Mass.
Cushing was an obvious choice to officiate. The Kennedy family had longstanding ties to New York’s Francis Cardinal Spellman, a Massachusetts native and the most prominent member of the American Catholic hierarchy. But during the 1960 presidential campaign, when Kennedy came out against federal aid for Catholic parochial schools, Spellman had supported Nixon. Cushing defended Kennedy. Moreover, Cushing had married JFK and Jacqueline and had officiated at the funeral of the couple’s infant son, Patrick Bouvier Kennedy, who died a few months before his father.
The ceremony for Patrick had been private, held in Cardinal Cushing’s own chapel. But the rites for JFK would be a state occasion, which meant balancing the elements of civil religion with the church’s canonical requirements. To many Protestant Americans, the Catholic Mass was slightly sinister, the mysterious ritual of a foreign faith. Kennedy’s Catholicism had been a campaign issue. A 1959 Gallup poll revealed that almost a quarter of Americans (24 percent) would not vote for a Catholic for president. In 1960, Kennedy won the popular vote by a razor-thin margin of fewer than 113,000.
The competing demands of a state funeral seemed to call for a simplified ritual. Jacqueline Kennedy insisted on a spoken Low Mass, not the more elaborate solemnities of a sung High Mass. And Cushing rebuffed Egidio Vagnozzi, the Apostolic Delegate to the United States, who said that a head of state was entitled to five ritual absolutions at the end of the liturgy. “If there are going to be five absolutions, you’ll have to say them yourself,” Cushing reportedly told him. “I won’t do it because they’ll last twice as long as the Mass itself.”
But a key aspect of the ancient ceremony would remain: the Latin language. Though the new vernacular Mass in English was due to be implemented by the Second Vatican Council the following year, the Latin Mass was still how Catholics married and buried. A president’s funeral was no exception.
The day of the funeral, November 25, 1963, Cushing, wearing a tall white miter, met the president’s casket on the steps of St. Matthew’s Cathedral in Washington. For millions of Americans watching on television, it was the first time they had seen a Catholic Mass. Cushing’s rapid-fire reading of the Latin liturgy did little to disabuse some Protestants of the notion that the Mass was a meaningless incantation. But the planners had anticipated this public relations challenge and, in a brilliant stroke, had enlisted the mellifluous Monsignor Leonard Hurley to provide voice-over commentary during the service.
Hurley’s poignant narration, reprinted in transcript in the New York Times, was like a primer on Catholic theology: “The Holy Eucharist is the daily bread that Christians everywhere devoutly pray for. For the Catholic, the sacramental Body of Christ received in the Eucharist is the Christ whom those who die in the Lord will meet in heaven.”
But in the end, Cushing stole the show in his typical improvisatory fashion. At the conclusion of the Mass, as he circled the casket, blessing Kennedy’s body with incense and holy water, he recited the prescribed words, including Requiescat in pace (“May he rest in peace”). But then he broke into English:
May the angels, dear Jack, lead you into Paradise. May the martyrs receive you at your coming. May the spirit of God embrace you, and mayest thou, with all those who made the supreme sacrifice of dying for others, receive eternal rest and peace. Amen.
By that point, both Cushing and Jacqueline were in tears. As he processed out, Cushing saw five-year-old Caroline Kennedy consoling her mother. He bent over and embraced the child. Jacqueline whispered to the Cardinal, “I’ll never forget you calling him ‘dear Jack.’”
Cushing’s down-to-earth performance at the funeral and the graveside won wide approval. Though purists today still grumble about his sloppy Latin pronunciation, ordinary laypeople at the time thanked him for his human touch. A man in Florida wrote to him on “how wonderful and consoling you were.” A woman in California wrote that if, as a Protestant, she found the Mass so comforting, “I am sure that those of your faith must have found it doubly so.”
Cushing continued to console Jacqueline Kennedy, serving as her de facto pastor until his own death in 1970. In 1968, he took considerable flak for defending her marriage to a divorced man, Aristotle Onassis, in violation of church rules. (Onassis’s Greek Orthodox marriage to his first wife had never been annulled.) Amid the controversy, Cushing proposed to retire early, but Pope Paul VI declined the offer.
Cushing’s legacy is extensive and includes the building of schools and hospitals, the founding of a foreign mission society, and the establishment of a seminary to train second-career clergy. His principled ecumenism—and his interfaith overtures to Jews in particular—influenced the documents coming out of Vatican II.
But these accomplishments are overshadowed by the day Cushing brought the requiem Mass to American living rooms. Thanks to the digitally preserved broadcast, Cushing will continue to be remembered as the raspy voiced Everyman who consoled the nation in its grief.
© 2023 by Peter J. Thuesen. All rights reserved
Bibliographical Note
Poll numbers from “Can a Catholic Win?” Time, May 18, 1959. On the planning for JFK’s funeral and the ceremony itself, see William Manchester, The Death of a President: November 20-November 25, 1963 (New York: Harper & Row, 1967): 644-45, 681-82. On its cultural significance, see D. G. Hart, American Catholic: The Politics of Faith during the Cold War (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2020), 61-62. “The Texts of Eulogy at the Funeral Service and Prayer by the Side of Grave,” and “Transcript of Commentary at Requiem Mass for Kennedy in Washington,” New York Times, November 26, 1963. Bart Barnes, “Leonard Hurley, Catholic Priest Who Grew a Maryland Congregation, Dies,” Washington Post, May 1, 2015. Correspondence from laypeople: Bill Boyle to Cardinal Cushing, 17 December 1963; Grace Weston to Cardinal Cushing, 17 December 1963; Richard James Cushing Papers, Archdiocese of Boston. Edward B. Fiske, “The Church and Jacqueline Onassis,” New York Times, October 27, 1968. For support of my archival research on Cardinal Cushing, I gratefully acknowledge a Hibernian Research Grant from the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism at the University of Notre Dame.
Illustration credit: Cecil Stoughton, White House Photographs, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston.