By Msgr. Owen F. Campion

FDR's dedication to ordinary people benefited Catholics

He gave them a place in government that had never been reached

New York's upper crust regarded Franklin D. Roosevelt and his wife, Eleanor, as turncoats. Both Roosevelt and his wife were to the manner born, both part of the city's social elite, just as their forebears had been for generations.

New York aristocrats ran American business, in the process fighting most efforts to improve the lives of workers. The Roosevelts deserted this caste by championing average Americans, the poor in particular.

Few New York aristocrats were Catholic at the time, but many ordinary people were Catholic. Mingling with the ordinary people, Franklin Roosevelt and his wife, both lifelong Episcopalians, moved in a circle of Catholics.

When Roosevelt became president in March 1933, he brought to his administration dozens of Catholics, including his chief political operative, James Aloysius Farley, whom he named chair of the Democratic National Committee and postmaster general of the United States. And, in those days, no other position in the Cabinet controlled more jobs.

Vatican connection

Roosevelt was enormously popular among Catholics. He gave Catholics a place in government they never had before and a respectability for which they had thirsted for so long.

Aided by his almost magical personality, he told Catholic audiences what they liked to hear, boasting that two famous Catholic Americans, Mother Elizabeth Bayley Seton, now a saint, and former Baltimore Archbishop James Roosevelt Bayley were his cousins.

In those days, the University of Notre Dame was virtually equated with American Catholicism. It offered Roosevelt an honorary doctorate, and the president happily accepted.

Catholics delightedly noted that the president's partner when he practiced law was a good Irish Catholic, Basil O'Connor.

When Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, the Vatican secretary of state who became Pope Pius XII in 1939, visited the United States, the Roosevelts received him almost with the dignity given foreign heads of state.

Roosevelt wanted diplomatic relations with the Holy See, but his political advisers warned him that he was playing with fire. The country, still alive with the bigotry that doomed the White House ambitions of Alfred E. Smith, Roosevelt's predecessor as New York governor, simply would not tolerate such a step.

The president backed away from the idea, but he did not back down. Instead of appointing an ambassador, he named Myron C. Taylor as his "personal representative" to the pope.

Roosevelt got a presence at the Vatican, pleasing the pope and charmed American Catholics.

Many historians say that political pragmatism drove Roosevelt's associations with Catholics. But no man as urbane as Roosevelt, and as close to as many Catholics as was he, could at the same time be in any way anti-Catholic.

Respect for all

His wife and distant cousin, Eleanor, was as sophisticated as her husband -- very well educated, having studied abroad, familiar with the rich Catholic cultures of France and Italy.

Financially independent herself, aside from whatever she shared with her wealthy husband, she had the freedom to pursue her interest in New York's poor, an interest that mystified New York's privileged class. From this interest, she developed her legendary drive for attaining human rights for all.

This led her to demand respect for people, regardless of their religion. None of this, however, kept her from actively opposing the Church on occasion, such as in the matter of birth control.

The 1928 election, she said, taught her how deep anti-Catholicism laid in the American soul. It disgusted her. She was convinced that it defeated Al Smith.

Smith eventually turned against Franklin Roosevelt. And when Smith died in 1944, Eleanor insisted Franklin attend Smith's Requiem Mass in St. Patrick's Cathedral. Despite his wife's appeals, he stayed in Washington.

Eleanor had her own mind. For her, Smith was a great American. When Archbishop Francis J. Spellman, coincidentally Frank-lin's friend, celebrated the "Happy Warrior's" funeral Mass, the First Lady sat in a place of honor.

Msgr. Owen F. Campion is the associate publisher of Our Sunday Visitor.