Our first Catholic President, John F. Kennedy, won the 1960 election by pledging to ignore any Catholic pope, bishop or priest who tried to dictate policy.
Now our second Catholic president, Joseph Biden, is being warned by Catholic leaders that they may punish him if he doesn’t go along with their policy dictates. They would deny Biden access to communion, and some Protestant leaders are cheering them on.
Talk about political whiplash.
Anti-Catholic sentiment — even prejudice — was a powerful force in the 1960 campaign. The fliers, newspaper columns and speeches by Protestant leaders may not have been on social media, but they still reached millions of people with the message that Kennedy would bow down to his church.
Some of that sentiment was no doubt sincere, and some was merely political for conservatives fearful of Kennedy’s liberal Democratic agenda.
Kennedy was concerned enough to accept an invitation to speak before a major Protestant leadership group, and confront the accusations head-on:
Here we are, 60 years later, in a very different world. Religious leaders and organizations are overtly political actors these days. They not only get away with it, they prosper.
Some of this change has to do with the question of abortion, which was not on the political radar in 1960. When the U.S. Supreme Court in 1972 legalized abortion that religious groups and conservative allies began to organize against abortion.
This fall, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops will consider a draft document on the eucharist that could result in denying Biden access to communion unless he works to bring U.S. law on abortion in line with the Catholic bishops.
Interestingly, this potentially aggressive religious political action is occurring at a time when the American people as a whole seem much less religious. Ten years after Kennedy was elected, only 11 percent of Americans said they never went to church. Toward the end of the last decade, it was up to 27 percent.
Despite the prominence of the Catholic Bishops and the Evangelical religious right, it may be that religious leaders have less real influence on the public mind than they did a half century ago. For instance, polls consistently show that a majority of American Catholics believe abortion should be legal in most or all cases, and one-quarter of American women getting abortions are Catholics.
Kennedy told the ministers: “Whatever issue may come before me as president — on birth control, divorce, censorship, gambling or any other subject — I will make my decision…in accordance with what my conscience tells me to be the national interest, and without regard to outside religious pressures or dictates.”
That’s the idea that Catholic bishops appear to be challenging. Do they really think Americans are OK with bishops and popes telling presidents and senators and governors what to do? How about rabbis doing the telling? How about ministers? How about imams?
Peter Slocum of Keene is a former Albany political reporter and public health advocate.
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