To four Americans and four U.S. communities came the second greatest honor the Church of Rome can bestow:
New York's plump, tireless, globetrotting, auctorial* Archbishop Francis Joseph Spellman learned of his elevation on the eve of going home to his father's for Christmas in Whitman, Mass. Asked if his appointment made this his happiest homecoming, he said: "The happiest was the day I came home ordained after five years away and said Mass for my father and mother." The onetime grocer's boy and champion horseshoe pitcher, now the able and beloved shepherd of Catholicism's richest archdiocese, is one of Pius XII's closest...
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