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Archdiocesan officials estimate that he has been responsible for at least $250 million worth of construction, including 120 elementary and high schools, 86 new parishes and four hospitals. Much of this he has managed with a financial skill worthy of J. Paul Getty. He called in all the surplus funds of his parishes and set up his own banking system, organized an insurance plan for archdiocesan property that has saved the parishes $10 million so far.
Nickels & Dimes. Cushing's fame as a fund-raiser is so great that one letter to his residence came addressed to "Come On Wealth" Avenue. He takes in and gives out about $20,000 a day. "No combination of 20 U.S. bishops has raised as much as Cushing has in nickels and dimes and half-dollars for the mission," says one bishop. Most of Cushing's donations come from what he calls "the mighty mites" of average Catholics, although he has a few tame millionaires whom he taps regularly, such as the Jewish couple who own Rockingham Park race track in New Hampshire. Last year he performed a spectacular feat that had nothing to do with the church: raising $1,000,000 in a few days, at the request of Bobby Kennedy, to ransom the Cuban prisoners captured after the Bay of Pigs.
Cushing works so hard at raising money that some laymen complain he thinks of nothing else. His capacity for work especially astonishes his doctor, since he suffers from asthma, emphysema, ulcers and migraine headaches, has had operations to remove a cancerous kidney and the prostate gland. He eats lightly ("I have to—I bleed"), sleeps with an oxygen tank beside his bed. "It is the wolf that keeps me on the go," he explains, "particularly the wolf at someone else's door."
Boston sees only half of what Cushing raises. He is a generous contributor to the Vatican, and offered to pay for a U.N.-like simultaneous translation system for the Ecumenical Council (the Pope declined). He is contributing $200,000 to renovate the Church of the Holy Spirit in Pope John's home town of Bergamo, $220,000 to build a cathedral for Laurean Cardinal Rugambwa of Tanganyika, $1,000,000 for Fu-jen University in Formosa. Cushing's generosity has made him at least as well known abroad as Spellman, and he collects decorations and honorary degrees from grateful recipients "in bunches like bananas." One of the most recent is the Grand Cross of the Order of Isabella the Catholic, which Spain gave him after he raised $5,000 for the orphaned children of Spanish sailors who died when their ship was lost at sea. "I thought Franco might make me a matador, or something," Cushing says.
The Pastoral Revolution. In earlier years, Cushing was in many ways conservative and narrow. In 1948 he denounced what he said was a conspiracy of "birth controllers, abortionists and mercy killers," and in 1949 he attacked Protestants and Other Americans United for Separation of Church and State as "a refined form of the Ku Klux Klan." He fought with Harvard's former President James Bryant Conant when Conant suggested that parochial and other independent schools are divisive, and he deplored secular universities. "There are too many instances where Catholic students have lost their faith and Americanism at these institutions," he roared.