The Waldorf Astoria: A Landmark Steeped in Catholic History

National Catholic Register, 16 October 2025

After an eight-year hiatus, the grand old New York hotel will once again serve as the site of the annual Al Smith dinner.

On Thursday night, New York’s annual Al Smith Dinner will return to its traditional Manhattan home, the Waldorf Astoria hotel, the Park Avenue landmark a few blocks’ walk from St. Patrick’s Cathedral. The grand hotel reopened this year after being closed for eight years of renovations.

The Al Smith Dinner, a fundraiser for Catholic Charities in New York, features the archbishop of New York and is attended by a white-tie array of America’s richest and most powerful. The guest speakers are often from the world of politics or media — this year, two former secretaries of state, Mike Pompeo and Antony Blinken. 

In presidential election years, the dinner is usually addressed by the two presidential nominees. By tradition, they set aside partisan acrimony for good-humored self-deprecation and kind words for the good works of the Catholic Church in New York. 

In 1984, President Ronald Reagan memorably used the occasion for a personal, heartfelt and generous tribute to the late Cardinal Terence Cooke, who had died the previous year, and whom Reagan had visited in his final days at his Madison Avenue residence, returning the visit Cardinal Cooke had made to the White House after the 1981 assassination attempt.

The Waldorf Astoria has national significance beyond New York in much the same way that Yankee Stadium does, and like Yankee Stadium, it enjoys significant Catholic connections. 

Every pope to visit New York has celebrated Mass at Yankee Stadium (St. Paul VI, St. John Paul II, Benedict XVI), until Pope Francis, who opted instead for Madison Square Garden. 

The original Waldorf Astoria was on the site of the Empire State Building, transferring to its current Park Avenue address in 1931. Along with the Empire State Building, its debut during the Great Depression was considered such a mark of national resilience and pride that President Herbert Hoover spoke at the ceremony. Close to Grand Central Terminal, the hotel had a railway spur that could bring trains into its basement, said to be used by prominent visitors who desired a discreet arrival, including President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

When the United Nations opened in 1946, there was concern that Black diplomats coming to New York might face discrimination from segregated hotels. But the Waldorf agreed to take all guests regardless of race, and thereby became designated as the official hotel of the U.N. and an unofficial center of international diplomacy.

That reached a peak in 1965, when Pope Paul VI made his one-day visit to New York, addressing the U.N., adoring the Blessed Sacrament at St. Patrick’s Cathedral and offering the Holy Mass at Yankee Stadium. This month marked the 60th anniversary of that visit on Oct. 4, the feast of St. Francis of Assisi, the patron saint of San Francisco, where the United Nations was founded. 

Amid the packed schedule of the day, the Holy Father met President Lyndon Johnson at the Waldorf. The United States did not then have diplomatic relations with the Holy See, so it was thought that LBJ could not meet the Pope “officially” at a U.S. government office. The Waldorf was suitable for a “private” meeting, as it had its unofficial status of a center of global diplomacy and greater prestige than any actual government building in Manhattan. 

Cardinal Francis Spellman, then New York’s archbishop and Paul VI’s host, may have told the Holy Father of Rome’s connection to the Waldorf. When Pope Pius XII was a cardinal, his titular church in Rome was Sts. John and Paul on the Caelian Hill. That title became vacant after his election as pope, and Pius XII assigned it to his friend from New York when creating him a cardinal in 1946.

Titular cardinals often act as benefactors of their Roman churches, and Cardinal Spellman did also. When the Waldorf was undergoing a renovation in the 1950s, the cardinal acquired the grand old chandeliers from the great ballroom and shipped more than two dozen of them to his church in Rome, a touch of New York luxury and elegance. Thus Sts. John and Paul is known as the “church of the chandeliers” — a bit of Park Avenue in the Eternal City.

Continue reading at the National Catholic Register.