Is there still a "Catholic question" in America? Reflections on John F. Kennedy's speech to the Houston Ministerial Association.

• Author: McConnell, Michael W.

[B]ecause I am a Catholic, and no Catholic has ever been elected President, the real issues in this campaign have been obscured--perhaps deliberately, in some quarters less responsible than this. So it is apparently necessary for me to state once again--not what kind of church I believe in, for that should be important only to me--but what kind of America I believe in.

John F. Kennedy, September 12, 1960 (1)

Fifty years ago, Senator John F. Kennedy, a Democrat from Massachusetts and a lifelong Roman Catholic, accepted an invitation from the Greater Houston Ministerial Association, a group of Protestant, predominantly Southern Baptist clergymen, to address what was then called "the Catholic Question" in American politics: could an adherent to the Roman Catholic religion be elected president of the United States?

At a distance of fifty years, the very question may seem antiquated and distasteful--a whiff of a bigotry now overcome, not least as a result of Kennedy's well chosen words, as well as his exemplary performance as the first Catholic president of the United States. Today, some 161 members of Congress are Catholics--30.1% of the federal legislature--despite an adult American population that is only 23.9% Catholic. (2) Catholics are even more heavily represented among U.S. governors. Twenty-one governors, or forty-two percent of the total, are Catholics. (3) Evidently, Americans trust Catholics to be their representatives and executives even more than they do most other religions. Most remarkably of all, fully two-thirds of the U.S. Supreme Court justices are Catholics, while not a single justice is a member of a Protestant denomination. (4) Vice President Joe Biden is a Catholic. (5) So are former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (6) and the 2004 Democratic presidential candidate, John Kerry. (7)

The Catholicism of these leaders has not been an issue, at least not in the way it was an issue for John F. Kennedy, and before him for Al Smith, the Democratic party's candidate for President in 1928. (8) Then, the fear was that Catholic officeholders might be too obedient to the teachings of their Church. (9) Today, to the extent the Catholicism of a candidate is even noticed, it is more likely that people wonder how these public figures can square their professed Catholicism with their evident lack of agreement with much that the Church teaches. (10) Pelosi, Biden, and Kerry, for example, are ardent supporters of the freedom to have an abortion, which the Church regards as an evil. (11)

Of course, a lot has changed since 1960. The nation has changed. Americans today are more religiously diverse (12) and more tolerant at least in some ways. (13) The great religious divide has shifted from Protestant/Catholic to secular/religious. (14) Today there may be more tension between more and less observant or orthodox believers within religious denominations than there is between those denominations.

Catholic doctrine has changed. Just a few years after Kennedy gave his speech, the great council at Vatican II largely adopted American notions of religious freedom and church-state separation, (15) thus putting to rest one of the most vexing issues facing Catholic candidates like Kennedy.

And Catholic Americans have changed. For the worse as well as for the better, Catholics have come to resemble Protestants. When Kennedy spoke, Catholics attended church more often than Protestants did. (16) Now those rates are about the same. (17) And Catholics now pay about as much attention to church teachings as Protestants do. Recent polls by the Pew Research Center have shown that Catholic attitudes toward such issues as abortion and homosexuality differ hardly at all from the general population. (18) In fact, according to Gallup polls, today conservative and evangelical Protestants are more likely to agree with many Catholic teachings than Catholics are. (19) So we are in a different world than the one facing John F. Kennedy as a Catholic American running for President in 1960.

To understand his speech, it is necessary to go back and discover anew why so many thoughtful people in 1960 believed there might be concerns about electing a Roman Catholic as president of the United States. This perspective may enable us to reflect upon Senator Kennedy's response, and what it might portend for the vexing question of religion and politics in a liberal republic even today. Let us consider what some historians have called the oldest prejudice in America, (20) the history of anti-Catholicism in the United States.

At the time of the Founding, there were about 30,000 Catholics in the United States--less than one percent of the population. (21) Most lived in the state of Maryland, which had been founded as a refuge for Catholics from British oppression. (22) There was no Catholic church south of Maryland before the signing of the Constitution. (23) Some Founders preferred to keep Catholics out of the new nation. In 1777, when New York was drafting its first state Constitution, John Jay--coauthor of The Federalist Papers and first Chief Justice of the United States--led an effort to exclude Catholics from citizenship, unless they forswore belief in transubstantiation and allegiance to the pope. (24) Such anti-Catholic attitudes in the minds of early Americans stemmed from deeply engrained association of Catholics with the royal absolutism of the last Catholic king, James II, (25) the oppression of Protestants in France after the revocation of the edict of Nantes (26) and opposition to studying the Bible in the vernacular. (27)

Nevertheless, relations with the Catholic minority were relatively peaceful until the 1830s, when Catholic immigrants, especially those from Ireland, began pouring into this country in large numbers. (28) Soon there were anti-Catholic riots, (29) Catholic churches were burned, (30) and Catholic students were beaten in public schools for refusing to use the King James Bible or the Protestant version of the Lord's Prayer. (31) By the 1850s, the nativist and anti-Catholic Know Nothing Party had gained power in a number of states. (32) After the Civil War, President Ulysses S. Grant predicted the new divide would be between Protestants and Catholics, or as he put it, "between patriotism and intelligence on one side, and superstition, ambition, and ignorance on the other." (33)

The Catholic Church did not help matters when Pope Pius IX issued a Syllabus of Errors (34) seemingly condemning liberalism, freedom of religion, separation of church and state, and even Americanism. (35) For example, the Syllabus condemned as an error the teaching that "[e]very man is free to embrace and profess that religion which, guided by the light of reason, he shall consider true." (36) Nor did the Church help itself, in some quarters, by defending slavery, or more precisely, opposing emancipation. (37) To many American liberals, the Church appeared to be a force against democracy, liberty, and freedom of thought. (38) Philosopher George Santayana, writing in The New Republic in 1916, declared that "[i]f ... the Catholic church ever became dominant in America, it would without doubt ... transform American life and institutions.... [I]t would abolish religious liberty, the freedom of the press, divorce, and lay education." (39) Theodore Roosevelt stated that the Catholic Church "is in no way suited to this country and can never have any great permanent growth except through immigration, for its thought is Latin and entirely at variance with the dominant thought of our country and institutions." (40)

Anti-Catholic sentiment helped defeat Al Smith in the 1928 presidential election, (41) though almost any Democrat would have lost to the popular Herbert Hoover, whatever his religion. (42) And anti-Catholicism did not subside even after the terrible events of World War II. In 1948, critics of the Church formed a new organization, called Protestants and Other Americans United for the Separation of Church and State (POAU) with the objective of "resist[ing] the declared purposes of the Roman Catholic Church further to breach the wall of separation between church and state." (43) The organization raised $1,000,000 in its first year. (44) At its first meeting, Methodist Bishop G. Bromley Oxnam, a pillar of the mainline establishment, decried the "policies of the hierarchy to establish here a culture alien to the traditions of a free people." (45)

With the serious prospect of a Catholic president in 1960, these long-simmering concerns came boiling out. POAU ran ads in major newspapers warning of the Catholic menace, (46) and one of its officers published a widely quoted article called If the U.S. Becomes 51% Catholic. (47) Meanwhile, the National Association of Evangelicals issued a tract entitled Shall America Bow to the Pope of Rome?, arguing against an American ambassador to the Vatican. (48)

The fullest statement of the reasons for opposition to a Catholic president can perhaps be found in an editorial in the evangelical Protestant magazine, Christianity Today. Entitled Bigotry or Smear?, the editorial explained that "[f]ar from bigotry, opposition to the nomination and election of a Romanist is perfectly rational": (49)

Opposition to political Romanism is not unreasoning, because a Catholic in the presidency would be torn between two loyalties as no Protestant has ever been. A candidate may announce, and even sincerely believe, that he is immune to Vatican pressure; but can we be sure that he will not succumb in the confessional booth to threats of purgatory and promises of merit from the organization which he believes to hold the keys of heaven? The Vatican does all in its power to control the governments of nations, and in the past and present it has often succeeded. The Pope favored Mussolini's conquest of Ethiopia. He made a concordat with Hitler, a concordat that still is in force in Germany as a last remnant of an evil rule.... We know that...