In September 1960, Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kennedy, against the advice of his political consultants, confronted anti-Catholic bigotry head-on in an extraordinary speech before a hostile audience of several hundred Protestant ministers in Houston.
This was days after another group of Protestant clergy, representing 37 denominations and presided over by Norman Vincent Peale, had declared that a Roman Catholic president would be “under extreme pressure by the hierarchy of his church.”
Kennedy vowed that, if elected, the oath that he would follow was the one he took upon his inauguration to defend the U.S. Constitution.
At a time when some equated Catholic teachings to socialism, the
Massachusetts senator said: “I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish; where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the Pope, the National Council of Churches or any other ecclesiastical source; where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials.”
Kennedy’s strong stance on the separation of church and state helped secure the narrow victory that made him the first Catholic president in U.S. history.
A little more than 60 years later, a second Catholic president sits in the White House, and the church’s American bishops appear to have forgotten what it took for one of their own to get there. On Friday, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops — defying a warning from the Vatican — voted to create guidelines for receiving the sacrament of Holy Communion.
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