On September 4, 1938, Cardinal Hayes of New York had died, leaving the largest diocese in the world without an archbishop for the first time since 1919. It was rumored that Fulton Sheen, only eight years into his radio career, with television still a decade in his future, might succeed him. Even for a figure as charismatic and intellectually gifted as Sheen, this was supremely unlikely. He was just forty-three years old and had spent only a single year in parish ministry. He had never held any administrative post. He had friends in the Vatican but no extensive base of support among the Curia—and, crucially, he knew virtually nothing about ecclesiastical politics.

For some reason, however, Sheen did for a time nourish fond hopes of being elevated to the vacant see. These vain expectations were probably encouraged by the fact that a successor was not named for several months. Many years later, Father John Tracy Ellis, the distinguished ecclesiastical historian, would recall a conversation he had with Sheen the day the appointment was announced by Pius XII: “Leaning his arm on the table with his head in his hand, [Sheen] exclaimed, ‘It is incredible. It is incredible. He has nothing.’ So deeply dejected was he that he took to his bed and remained there for several days.”

The “he” of this exclamation was Francis J. Spellman, then an auxiliary bishop in Boston. Spellman was only six years older than Sheen; he had almost no public profile. What he had instead were decades of experience in political and diplomatic circles and a reputation as a dutiful episcopal gaffer.

Born in Whitman, Massachusetts, in 1895 to an Irish immigrant family, Spellman had received a public education because no local parochial school existed. From adolescence onward he exhibited a Widmerpoolian doggedness that would become one of the defining features of his character. Prevented by injury from playing baseball, he insisted upon serving as the team’s manager; sent to study for the priesthood in Rome at the prestigious Pontifical North American College, he came down with pneumonia but insisted over the advice of his doctors and superiors upon remaining abroad, where a number of future cardinals were among his cherished acquaintances. His first appointment in Boston following his ordination in 1916 was the chaplaincy of a female nursing home. Despised by Archbishop O’Connell, his superior in Boston, who referred to him as “that little popinjay,” he insisted that his talents were not being made use of. Slowly, by inexorable degrees, he managed to become the subscriptions manager for the diocesan newspaper; by 1918 he was the archdiocese’s assistant chancellor and by 1924 its official archivist. A year later, he was named the first American attaché at the Vatican, where he would remain in various diplomatic posts until 1932, when Pius XI named him an auxiliary bishop.

Spellman’s tenacity was not always rewarded, at least not immediately. During World War I, Spellman had applied as many as four times to serve as a military chaplain and each time found himself rejected (including twice personally by Franklin Roosevelt, then serving as assistant secretary of the Navy) on account of his short stature. He sometimes spoke intemperately. He was disgusted by the election of Cardinal Roncalli to the papacy as John XXIII in 1958. “He’s no pope,” Spellman hissed. “He should be selling bananas.” Even at the height of the future saint’s popularity, he made it clear that he had little time for “Good Pope John,” whose papal arms he refused to display at St. Patrick’s. Instead even beyond the grave he remained devoted to John’s predecessor. Visitors to St. Patrick’s in the early 1960s would have been startled to find a hideous life-sized wax effigy of Pius XII, encased in glass and outfitted with a set of the pope’s own vestments. Eventually the dummy found a new home, in Spellman’s own residence.

“Even if you cannot find it within your heart to defend the rights of innocent little children and heroic, helpless men like Cardinal Mindszenty, can you not have the charity not to cast upon them still another stone?” he once wrote to Eleanor Roosevelt. “America’s Catholic youth fought a long and bitter fight to save all Americans from oppression and persecution. Their broken bodies on blood-soaked foreign fields were given as tragic testimony to this fact. I saw them there—on every fighting front—as they equally shared with their fellow fighters all the sacrifice, terror, and gore of war—as alike they shared the little good and glory that sometimes comes to men as together they fight and win a brutal battle.” They were arguing about school buses.

For Spellman questions of theology held little interest. “I hire theologians” was his final, contemptuous verdict on the subject. He celebrated Mass in an indifferent, brisk manner and said his breviary as quickly as possible. A secretary described Spellman as having exhibited “the slam-bang approach to religion of a very busy man.” He reserved his energy for practical matters, such as film censorship (he forbade Catholics from seeing Elia Kazan’s Baby Doll under pain of mortal sin) and collecting perfume (his nickname in certain circles was “Bubbles”). His limited speculative imagination was given over instead to the two topics that seemed to interest him most: the evils of communism and the awesome beauty of America’s armed forces. He considered Douglas MacArthur the greatest living American. His high opinion of Joe McCarthy was bolstered by the latter’s military record: “The fact that a man was a Marine places him very high in my book as regards patriotism.” He insisted that American foreign policy after Hiroshima “springs from a deep evangelical motive.”

After World War II, during which he had managed to secure his own appointment at the head of the U.S. military ordinariate, he railed against “further ostrich-like actions and pretenses” and demanded that the American people “unite to stop the Communist floodings of our own land” and “save civilization from the world’s most fiendish, ghoulish men.” In 1949, diocesan cemetery workers were denied a cost-of-living increase, and he demanded that they sever their connection with the Food, Tobacco, Agricultural, and Allied Workers Union, which he insisted was under communist domination. But the workers held their ground, and Spellman decided that he would depute a group of students to end the standoff. “It was,” as one early enthusiastic biographer put it, “a dramatic and courageous step that was taken on March 3 when the Ordinary of the Archdiocese of New York led seminarians in sweat shirts and dungarees through the picket line at Calvary Cemetery.” That is certainly one way of putting it. But Spellman remained aloof. “If stopping a strike like this isn’t a thing of honor,” he said, “then I don’t know what honor is.”

It is not clear how well Sheen and Spellman were actually acquainted in 1939, but it is telling that a decade before the two men would find themselves in regular contact there was already, on one side anyway, a pronounced enmity. In any case, the sense that there was a contest between them seems already to have existed in Spellman’s mind every bit as much as it did in Sheen’s. For many years Spellman had received gifts—five-figure cash sums, lavish meals, expensive bottles of wine—from Genevieve Brady, a wealthy woman who spent her winters in a villa on the Janiculum Hill. The relationship was hardly one-sided. Spellman had helped to secure papal titles of nobility for Mrs. Brady (as she continued to be known even after the death of her first husband and her subsequent marriage to the Irish politician William Babington Macaulay). A papal duchess, a Dame of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, a Dame of the Order of the Holy Sepulchre, a recipient of the “Pro Ecclesia et Pontifice” Medal from the Vatican and the Laetare Medal from the University of Notre Dame, an honorary Doctor of Law, she held seats on the boards of the National Women’s Committee on Welfare and Relief Mobilization and the Girl Scouts. She gave a vast estate in Manhasset, New York, and a Tintoretto to the Jesuits. But by the end of her life she felt that Spellman had betrayed her and she froze him out of her will. When she died in Rome in 1938, Spellman made note of those who had benefited from Mrs. Brady’s posthumous largesse and the amount each had received: to Archbishop Murray of St. Paul she left two hundred fifty thousand dollars; Cardinal Pacelli, Spellman’s longtime mentor, received one hundred thousand dollars, the same amount as Monsignor Fulton J. Sheen. These sums, equivalent to several million dollars each today, were extraordinary. “I was to receive $100,000,” Spellman wrote in his diary, adding that he had “no regrets.” Was this true? It is difficult to think that he did not regret losing out, even though the actual amount once promised had been only forty-five thousand dollars.

The affair of Mrs. Brady provides an instructive window into the relationship between these two figures. Spellman was a shrewd administrator whose efforts on behalf of Pacelli and Joseph Kennedy, Jr., had helped to normalize diplomatic relations between Washington and the Vatican. Sheen was, even then, probably the most beloved and well-known priest in the United States, a captivating preacher, a broadcast pioneer and bestselling author. Is it possible that each man simultaneously loathed and envied what he saw in the other? Sheen was already the author of more than twenty books when Spellman composed a prose poem on the unlikely subject of the Korean War and its relationship with athletics.

Silhouetted in the dusk of evening, they looked like boys coming home from a ball field with bats resting on their shoulders. They might have been coming over a swell of land in Iowa; they might have been coming over a rise of ground in Texas; they might have been coming over a hill in New England; but it was all too clear that they were coming down a slope in Korea after having played a game with death. It was in such weird and unusual circumstances that the function of baseball in our national life came into sharper perspective, for there is a valid and true correlation between Korea and baseball. Ultimately both are concerned with the same reality, the virtue of gesture. In ordinary conversation this virtue is often labeled “fair play,” for “fair play” is the American way of saying that every man be given his rights.

As these efforts suggest, Spellman was not an outstanding prose stylist. But this did not prevent him from attempting to secure a literary reputation for himself. After World War II, he took the unusual step of hiring Gertrude Algase, Sheen’s literary agent, who was given her own office in the chancery. This was an odd arrangement. Her colleagues, most of them priests, called her “Mortal Sin.” But she applied herself assiduously to her duty of trying to place essays, articles, travelogues under Spellman’s byline in newspapers and magazines and to secure publication of a number of inspirational books. The results were what one gracious critic called “a shelf of slender volumes,” of which The Foundling, Spellman’s only novel, is easily the most interesting:

He remembered big Jack—only twenty-one, gay, handsome, laughing—reading aloud his letters from home, his even, strong teeth gleaming white against the natural tan of his skin. Jack shared his fun, his gifts, his rations as he shared his life—to bring joy to others less joyous than himself.

By 1951, Sheen would find himself in the position that Spellman had been in with Archbishop McConnell, serving under him in the sometimes unenviable role of auxiliary bishop. Three years earlier, on a joint trip to the Pacific, Spellman had joked to reporters that “Monsignor Sheen had three fat wreaths hung around his neck in Honolulu while mine was adorned with only one delicate one.” It would not be long before the latent, no doubt mutually instinctive dislike felt by both men became more pronounced. Many of their conflicts would involve Sheen’s conscientious stewardship of the Society for the Propagation of the Faith. On one occasion the head of Catholic Relief Services approached Sheen at Spellman’s behest demanding a sizable loan. He explained that the money was needed to ship goods to the poor abroad and insisted that the costs would be reimbursed later by the State Department, which in those days partnered with the Church and various Protestant bodies in administering foreign aid. All Sheen needed to do was hand over the money and Catholic Relief Services would pay Propagation back when it received its next round of funding from the federal government. Sheen refused. The money under his control was already spoken for, and in any case such a move would require the approval of the Vatican—besides, the indirect reimbursement scheme proposed by Spellman was almost certainly illegal. In the end Sheen was forced to pay the freight charges anyway, possibly without reimbursement.

These conflicts were probably inevitable. The cardinal, who had worked harder than anyone to restore the bankrupt Vatican treasury after the war and had steered both federal and archdiocesan funds to the coffers of anti-communist political parties on the continent, took an expansive view of his own financial prerogatives. Dollars were infinitely fungible. No distinction was made between his own assets and those of the Church’s numerous organs. Governments and well-heeled laymen were equally suited to bestowing the tribute his noble aims and comfortable position required. He sold honors with the heedlessness of a Renaissance cardinal. In those days it was known that the minimum price tag for membership in the Knights of Malta was five thousand dollars—but most aspirants would end up paying more. Even more valuable to some of Spellman’s clients was the chance to have one’s picture taken with the cardinal. One donor would recall how he kept a framed photograph of Spellman on his desk in case of a visit from the I.R.S.: “It worked.”

Without being naïve about the wide array of motives that necessarily accompanies all charitable giving, Sheen took a more high-minded view of Catholic philanthropy. This is understandable given his experience of raising millions of dollars in small donations from largely working-class admirers. He would run up against the limits of his position during the Great Milk War of 1957.

Long before the rise of so-called “faith-based initiatives,” the federal government partnered with the Church to distribute surplus food to the poor. When Spellman caused a large shipment of powdered milk to be given over to Sheen for use by Propagation, he presented Sheen with a bill for several hundred thousand dollars. Sheen (rightly) insisted that the milk had been donated and that he was under no obligation to write a check to Spellman for what the archdiocese had received free of charge on the understanding that it would be distributed for nothing. Spellman was apoplectic, but Sheen refused to be cowed. Without informing his superior of his intentions, he took his case directly to Pius XII. Or rather he tried to do so. By 1957, the pope was eighty-one years old. Securing an immediate audience would have been difficult under the best of circumstances, but access to His Holiness was effectively controlled by a group of Spellman’s old cronies, allies since his days as a Roman seminarian. When Sheen found himself stonewalled, Spellman settled upon a counter-attack: he insisted that his auxiliary bishop resign his directorship of Propagation in order to take up ordinary pastoral duties at a newly established parish. In the meantime, he adopted a subtler stratagem: making inquiries into Sheen’s private life, hoping to find evidence of . . . something. But it was no use. Reconnaissance missions confirmed that his recalcitrant auxiliary was as chaste and upstanding as his reputation suggested.

For once, Sheen would prove himself cunning as well. Again he sought an audience with the pope, possibly through the ministrations of a disaffected member of the curia who held Spellman in low esteem. When Pius learned of the situation, he demanded that Sheen and Spellman come to Rome immediately. Here both men rehearsed their tales. The cardinal swore that he had purchased the milk; Sheen avowed that it had been freely distributed by the government and that he could not be ordered to pay anything for it, much less the outrageous amount demanded by Spellman. The aging pope craftily suggested that Washington could settle the matter. The reply soon vindicated Sheen’s version of events. Not only was the matter settled in Sheen’s favor—Spellman effectively lost his influence with Pius. He had attempted to coerce a successor of the Apostles into violating both federal and canon law, and after being caught out, he had lied to the Holy Father, his old friend of many years’ standing.

Spellman vowed revenge, promising that whether it took six months or a decade, he would get even. “Everyone will know what you are like!” In fact, it seems to have taken less than a year. In 1958, Sheen surprised millions by suddenly announcing his decision to retire from television for “spiritual reasons.” To observers in New York, it was clear what had happened. Nor did the vindictive campaign end with the cancellation of Life Is Worth Living. Priests throughout the archdiocese quickly discovered that Sheen was persona non grata; even seminarians were made party to vague if absurd rumors that the charismatic auxiliary bishop lived an execrable life. Somehow, too, despite his enemy’s reduced prestige in Rome, the prospect of his promotion to a see of his own, once almost certain, seemed to disappear. The American episcopate was still firmly under Spellman’s thumb. From William A. Scully in Albany to James Francis McIntyre in Los Angeles, the former donzels and cupbearers known as “Spelly’s boys” occupied bishops’ mansions across the United States. There was no mistaking his authority. When his old crony Bryan J. McEntegart was named bishop of Brooklyn, Spellman did not even bother to allow the apostolic nuncio to announce the appointment first, as protocol dictated. A year earlier, in the middle of his battle with Sheen, Spellman had brought all of his loyal retainers among the American bishops—as well as a number of churchmen such as Sheen and Richard Cushing of Boston who were at odds with him—to Yankee Stadium for a special Mass to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of his episcopal consecration. Processing with policemen and firemen and twenty handsome West Point cadets, he marched to his throne, which sat atop a gigantic platform specially constructed for the occasion, complete with a glass-enclosed altar in the event that wind threatened the candles. The choir sang “The Star-Spangled Banner.” He preferred it to Church music.

Sheen continued to roll with the punches. He could not prevent Spellman from treating Propagation as an all-purpose slush fund. But he refused to cover for his superior. When asked about the society’s finances at a meeting in Rome, he replied, “Cardinal Spellman can better answer where the money is since he took it.” In case his meaning was unclear, he gestured in the direction of one member of the curia who was on Spellman’s payroll and shouted, “You can ask that man about fifty thousand dollars.”