By Michael Miner
“When one finds it inadequate or in error about events and persons one knows,” Greeley wrote in his review, “one becomes suspicious of the whole enterprise.” He concluded that Man of the Century is a book “rich in anecdotal detail” but whose “frequent inaccuracy and occasional meanness make it untrustworthy. Caveat emptor.”
“I begin with what he says about himself, as people would assume he was at least right about that. He says: ‘It is not true that I run the National Opinion Research Center nor that I had a staff to research the voting in the 1978 papal conclave,’ implying that my book falsely stated these things. On page 7, I wrote, referring to 1978, ‘Greeley also helped run the National Opinion Research Center…’ (emphasis added)….At no place did I write that Greeley had a staff–although in his book [The Making of the Popes 1978], he did say so.”
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One is James Spain, a diplomat and former CIA employee. Kwitny wrote that in 1963 John XXIII issued the encyclical Pacem in Terris, which “accused both sides in the Cold War of violating human rights” and declared that even communist movements, in the encyclical’s words, “contain elements that are positive and deserving of approval.” John McCone, President Kennedy’s Catholic director of the CIA, reacted by visiting the pope and asking him “to stop being evenhanded.” Pope John declined. “On Kennedy’s orders, McCone then sent James W. Spain, a CIA undercover agent posing as a scholar, to infiltrate the Vatican.
Before writing his rebuttal, Kwitny tracked Spain down in Sri Lanka and interviewed him. He discovered that he’d misread one of his original sources, Spain’s own account of his Vatican trip as it appeared in 1984 in the Tablet, a British magazine. McCone hadn’t sent Spain to the Vatican. Spain had visited on his own initiative before seeing McCone at a CIA meeting in Frankfurt. There Spain shared his impressions of the Vatican with McCone, who suggested he put them in a memo to the president.
Defending his language, Kwitny told Kaiser, “Although the word ‘heresy’ wasn’t used by the university Board of Trustees, the definition on page 507 of the new Catechism of the Catholic Church applies precisely: ‘Heresy is the obstinate post-baptismal denial of some truth which must be believed with divine and Catholic faith, or it is likewise an obstinate doubt concerning the same.’”
Later Kwitny wrote of “damning tapes” that came to light revealing Greeley’s wish to replace Cardinal John Cody with Bernardin in time to influence the selection of Paul VI’s successor. Greeley suspected Cody of financial misconduct, but “didn’t back up his allegations” when a top investigative reporter came to town. Evidence didn’t turn up until 1981, three years after Paul VI had died. Federal prosecutors stepped in, Kwitny wrote, while “the Chicago Sun-Times and its rival the Tribune competed in a newspaper war with front-page headlines about Cody, his finances, and the plot to get him.” That’s when “Greeley admitted, with appropriate embarrassment, that his earlier statements had been ‘fantasies.’”
