John Kennedy in 1960 And The US Bishops In 2021

While compiling the timeline in yesterday's post, I ran into the intriguing data item that Episcopalian Bishop of California James Pike had publicly opposed John F Kennedy's candidacy in the 1960 presidential election due to his Catholic faith. I was 12 years old at the time, and while I was vaguely following the election, I didn't notice this then, although I was aware of some concerns that if Kennedy were Catholic, he would somehow be under an obligation to do whatever the pope told him to do.

A churchgoing Presbyterian at the time, I had only the sketchiest notion of Catholic teaching. I probably knew Catholics were even more opposed to divorce than Protestants as of 1960, but that was about it, and I was innocent of the other details. In any case, the media at the time covered the issue as a question of whether the pope, as part of a nefarious plan for world domination, could order Kennedy as president to attack, say, Paraguay.

Returning to the issue over 60 years later, it's now much clearer what Pike, a member of the Anglo-Liberal faction of Episcopalians, had in mind. He definitely wasn't talking about, say, Paraguay. Pike, a randy guy, was thinking ahead: what if Kennedy, as a Catholic, were encouraged by the likes of Cardinal Cushing or Bishop Sheen to foster public policies that were friendly to Catholic teachings on marriage and the family?

Kennedy, who must certainy have been aware of such concerns and a randy guy himself, nevertheless seems to have responded more on the basis that no, he wouldn't let the pope or any other prelate order an attack on Paraguay. On September 12, 1960, he addressed Protestant clergy at the Greater Houston Ministerial Association to relieve them and other Protestants of their concerns. He said in part,

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; and where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act against all.

. . . Finally, I believe in an America where religious intolerance will someday end; where all men and all churches are treated as equal; where every man has the same right to attend or not attend the church of his choice; where there is no Catholic vote, no anti-Catholic vote, no bloc voting of any kind; and where Catholics, Protestants and Jews, at both the lay and pastoral level, will refrain from those attitudes of disdain and division which have so often marred their works in the past, and promote instead the American ideal of brotherhood.

I think this is opportnistic and disingenuous, and it misstates the issue. Abraham Lincoln, without any formal religious instruction, nevertheless settled on views recognizably similar to Christian rationalism that drove his public statements and later policies on abolition. Winston Churchill relied heavily on their mutual Anglicanism to draw Franklin Roosevelt into close alignment with the British in 1940 and 1941. Harry Truman recognized and supported Israel due largely to his friendship with Edward Jacobson. In practice, religious views can't be separated from government policy.

In addition, Kennedy could not seriously have believed there should be "no Catholic vote". He relied on it in a very close election. But Kennedy isn't a Catholic authority. In 1960, the US Supreme Court hadn't begun to rule on religious issues, and there was a broad national acceptance, outside avant-garde circles, of a de facto agreement to look the other way on issues like pornography, birth control, and abortion. In effect, Kennedy was promising not to rock the boat. (Pike was not brought over, though.)

Beyond that, Lumen Gentium, which gave Catholics generally and bishops in particular the responsibility of evangelizing, hadn't been promulgated. The problem was that over the next 60 years, the courts and legislatures began formalizing the informal arrangements that looked the other way over problems that had been fairly limited at the start of the period, setting definite public policies that exacerbated the social problems resulting from widespread divorce, birth control, and abortion.

Meanwhile, Catholic politicians were continuing to rely on a "Catholic vote" that Kennedy had made clear was to stay away from public policy decisions. I would guess that figues like Cardinals Cushing and Bernardin felt this was a legitimate tradeoff as long as Catholics could enter more widely into public life. The difficulty continued to be, after 1964, Lumen Gentium.

I've seen a few Catholic commentators who've recognized that the move this year for the US bishops to draft a teaching document on Catholic politicians who've lived quite well on the tacit agreement to stay out of Catholic pollcy issues is, in fact, a move to bring things into alignment with Lumen Gentium, at this stage well overdue.

Do pre-Conciliarists want a return to 1960, when the tacit policy that Catholic politicians could hitchhike on the Catholic brand without actually being good Lumen Gentium Catholics was established?