Early Life and Education
Francis Spellman was born in Whitman, Massachusetts, to William and Ellen (née Conway) Spellman. His father (1858–1957), whose own parents had immigrated to the United States from Clonmel and Leighlinbridge in Ireland, worked in shoemaking before becoming a grocer. The eldest of five children, Francis had two brothers, Martin and John, and two sisters, Marian and Helene. As a child, he served as an altar boy at the Holy Ghost Church. He had a difficult relationship with his strict father, but was very attached to his mother.
Spellman attended Whitman High School because there was no local Catholic school. He enjoyed photography and baseball; he was a first baseman during his first year of high school until a hand injury forced him to stop playing, and later managed the team. Following his high school graduation, Spellman entered Fordham University in New York in 1907. He graduated in 1911 and decided to study for the priesthood. He was then sent by Archbishop William Henry O'Connell to study at the Pontifical North American College in Rome. During his years in Rome, Spellman befriended such figures as Gaetano Bisleti, Francesco Borgongini Duca, and Domenico Tardini. He also suffered from pneumonia, leaving his state of health so poor that his superiors wanted him to leave the North American College. He nevertheless remained and managed to complete his doctorate.
Read more about this topic: Francis Spellman
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or education:
“Love is the hardest thing in the world to write about. So simple. You’ve got to catch it through details, like the early morning sunlight hitting the gray tin of the rain spout in front of her house. The ringing of a telephone that sounds like Beethoven’s “Pastoral.” A letter scribbled on her office stationery that you carry around in your pocket because it smells of all the lilacs in Ohio.”
—Billy Wilder (b. 1906)
“For every life and every act
Consequence of good and evil can be shown
And as in time results of many deeds are blended
So good and evil in the end become confounded.”
—T.S. (Thomas Stearns)
“I envy neither the heart nor the head of any legislator who has been born to an inheritance of privileges, who has behind him ages of education, dominion, civilization, and Christianity, if he stands opposed to the passage of a national education bill, whose purpose is to secure education to the children of those who were born under the shadow of institutions which made it a crime to read.”
—Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825–1911)