A few who asked this question were bigots who would resort to schemes of discrimination and repression that had no place in a free society. But most were thoughtful people who felt they were defending not only their own creed, but the cherished traditions of freedom of religion and the separation of church and state. As Americans, they could not and did not object to Catholics following rules of their own church. What they did object to was the imposition on Catholics and non-Catholics alike of Catholic standards, through legislation and economic and political pressure, on education, censorship, marriage and divorce, on medical practices of contraception, legal abortion, and in other matters. And they objected to Catholic-backed laws that would pierce the wall separating church and state, laws that provided, for example, for governmental aid to church schools.
Protestants, along with most leaders of the Jewish community and most of those who did not identify themselves with any of the three major American faiths, subscribed to the admonition of Jesus: “Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s.” So did many Catholics. But here was the rub: Catholic official doctrine, some Protestants contended, assumed papal infallibility even on temporal matters, at least according to the Vatican Council of 1870. Given the authoritarian, centralized, hierachical nature of the Roman Catholic Church and its power to discipline its communicants, including officeholders, the Church was able, some contended, to expand Roman Catholic power by moving into areas like education that were supposed to be in Caesar’s domain.
At the heart of this position was the belief that the “American way” turned on the maintenance of an open, free, and mixed society, on the maintenance, in short, of pluralism. Roman Catholic power threatened such a society, many Protestants said, because, in its official doctrine, at least, it set no limits to the reach of papal power. And since the reach was unlimited, Catholics could not be allowed to breach the church-state wall “just a little,” because one opening in the dike would be followed by more and more breaches as Catholic power expanded. In education especially, Protestants feared that government services such as bus transportation and health services, claimed ostensibly for the child alone, would be followed by demands for more services such as textbooks, blackboards, the fireproofing of parochial schools, and so on that would strengthen the institution—the Church itself—within whose sphere the help was given. Protestants cited other cases in point. Ultimately, they feared, American freedom would give way to Catholic power.
For years, the tension between Catholic and Protestant had simmered under the surface of national life, or erupted in isolated struggles. In 1928, the conflict had—perhaps ominously for Kennedy three decades later—flamed up during Al Smith’s campaign for the presidency. Much of it was precipitated by Ku Klux Klan bigotry that encompassed Jews and others as well. But some of it took the form of a debate between Catholic and Protestant spokesmen. The April 1927 issue of the venerable Boston magazine the Atlantic had carried an “Open Letter to the Honorable Alfred E. Smith,” by Charles C. Marshall, sharply challenging Smith’s ability, if elected President, to govern under the Constitution rather than under papal dictates. Smith answered the challenge in the next issue of the magazine. “I recognize no power in the institutions of my Church to interfere with the operations of the Constitution of the United States or the enforcement of the law of the land.… I believe in the absolute separation of Church and State.… I believe in the support of the public school as one of the corner stones of American liberty.”
Al Smith concluded, “In this spirit I join with fellow Americans of all creeds in a fervent prayer that never again in this land will any public servant be challenged because of the faith in which he has tried to walk humbly with his God.”
A vain hope. Although his statement had been enthusiastically acclaimed, the “Happy Warrior’s” nomination for President in 1928 set off a surge of anti-Catholicism. During his election campaign, he squarely faced the issue; in centers of Ku Klux Klan strength he spoke on immigration and assaulted the forces of bigotry. Here and now, he cried, I “drag them into the open and I denounce them as a treasonable attack upon the very foundations of American liberty.” But nothing—argument, indignation, explanation, emphatic disclaimers—seemed to do much good. The reasoned, moderate, Protestant position was obscured by the flood of bigotry, as was the reasoned Catholic answer. The relation of religion and politics was not, in 1928, a subject for honest and rational debate.
Kennedy Takes His Stand
Three decades after Smith’s defeat, another Catholic candidate for the presidency awaited questions from reporters following a talk to the Los Angeles Press Club.
“Do you think a Protestant can be elected President in 1960?” a reporter asked amid laughter.
Kennedy grinned: “If he’s prepared to answer how he stands on the issue of the separation of church and state, I see no reason why we should discriminate against him!” There was a roar of applause.
For Kennedy it was a nice twist on the old religious question that had been confronting him in one form or another ever since his boyhood. His family was devout, close to the Boston hierarchy, and a heavy contributor to Catholic churches and charities. Joseph Kennedy gave millions to the Church through the Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr. Foundation, which was headed for a time by John Kennedy, and later by his brother Bob.
Yet the Kennedy men, in contrast to the Kennedy women, were not brought up entirely in a Catholic mold. Joseph, Sr. attended parochial school only to the seventh grade, when he switched to Boston Latin and later to Harvard. John Kennedy spent only one year in a Catholic school—and even that school was taught by laymen. He never made a display of his religion, though he observed the formalities. He never encountered anti-Catholic bias in school and hence was not forced back into a tight, defensive embrace with the Church.
It was not surprising, therefore, that Kennedy entered Congress without strong convictions about the problem of church and state. During his first years there he took the position that under federal aid to education programs, private- and parochial-school students should share in funds for bus transportation, nonreligious textbooks, and health services, and he introduced a bill to this effect that was lost in the midst of the public controversy between Mrs. Roosevelt and Cardinal Spellman. The next year, Kennedy retreated from this position to support an amendment (which failed) to a federal-aid-to-education bill, providing funds for bus transportation alone, and more recently he has strongly backed federal-aid bills that lacked any provision at all for aid to parochial-school students.
He argued that his Church was not trying to extend its authority over secular affairs and, in an address at Notre Dame in January 1950, when he received an honorary degree, he affirmed the allegiance of American Catholics to democracy:
“You have been taught,” he told the graduating class, “that each individual has an immortal soul, composed of an intellect which can know truth and a will which is free. Because of this every Catholic must believe in the essential dignity of the human personality on which any democracy must rest. Believing this, Catholics can never adhere to any political theory which holds that the state is a separate, distinct organization to which allegiance must be paid rather than a representative institution which derives its powers from the consent of the governed.
“In addition, a Catholic’s dual allegiance to the Kingdom of God on the one hand prohibits unquestioning obedience on the other to the state as an organic unit.”
Six years later, just before the Democratic convention, when Kennedy had lost the vice-presidential spot in a close contest to Kefauver, a reporter asked him: “Conceivably there could be a situation in which the dictates of your church and the demands of your country would conflict. In such a case, where would your higher loyalty lie?”
“In the first place,” Kennedy answered, “I can’t think of any issue where such a conflict might arise. But suppose it did? Nobody in my church gives me orders. It doesn
’t work that way. I’ve been in Congress for ten years and it has never happened. People are afraid that Catholics take orders from a higher organization. They don’t. Or at least I don’t.
“Besides, I can’t act as a private individual does; my responsibility is to my constituents and to the Constitution. So if it came to a conflict between the two, and not just a personal moral issue, I am bound to act for the interests of the many.”
The liberals’ concern about the issue of separation of church and state was reflected in a comment by Mrs. Roosevelt in a Detroit interview. When she was asked if she had made up her mind whom to support for the 1960 presidential spot, she said, no, but “I did not say I was not for Kennedy; what I said was that I hoped that the first President who was elected and who was a Roman Catholic would be one whom we felt certain had the character to separate church and state completely, and I have been simply worried because I had not been sure that Senator Kennedy could do that.…” She thought that 1960 was very different from 1928 and that a man’s religion would not be the determining factor; “I think it will depend on the feeling that people have about the character of the man, his own qualifications.” She had said much the same thing a few months earlier to Look: “If I approved of a candidate, I would have no qualms about him because of his religion.… I do not think a Catholic would be a handicap on the ticket.”
The fullest statement of Kennedy’s recent views came almost by accident late in 1958 when Fletcher Knebel, a Look reporter, asked Kennedy his views on the religious issue as a part of a general roundup story on Catholic candidates in 1960. Kennedy’s answer was off the cuff:
“Whatever one’s religion in his private life may be,” he told Knebel, “for the officeholder nothing takes precedence over his oath to uphold the Constitution and all its parts—including the First Amendment and the strict separation of church and state. Without reference to the presidency, I believe as a senator that the separation of church and state is fundamental to our American concept and heritage and should remain so.
“I am flatly opposed to appointment of an ambassador to the Vatican,” Kennedy went on. “Whatever advantages it might have in Rome—and I’m not convinced of these—they would be more than offset by the divisive effect at home.
“The First Amendment to the Constitution is an infinitely wise one. There can be no question of Federal funds being used for support of parochial or private schools. It’s unconstitutional under the First Amendment as interpreted by the Supreme Court. I’m opposed to the Federal Government’s extending support to sustain any church or its schools. As for such fringe matters as buses, lunches and other services, the issue is primarily social and economic and not religious. Each case must be judged on its merits within the law as interpreted by the courts.”
A storm arose as soon as Look hit the newsstands, amid wide newspaper coverage. The main outcry came from Kennedy’s coreligionists. America, the Jesuit weekly, expressed its impatience with “the earnest Senator’s efforts to appease bigots.” The editor flayed Kennedy for asserting that whatever one’s religion in his private life nothing takes precedence over his oath. “Mr. Kennedy doesn’t really believe that. No religious man, be he Catholic, Protestant or Jew, holds such an opinion. A man’s conscience has a bearing on his public as well as his private life.” In his statement, the Senator himself had, in effect, violated the Constitution, America implied, by submitting himself to a religious test.
Other Catholic journals were no less severe. The Senator was overeager and had overstated his case, asserted a Providence diocesan newspaper. Why should a Catholic candidate permit himself to be queried on his “Americanism” by the Blanshards [Paul Blanshard] and the Archers [Glenn Archer of Protestants and Other Americans United for the Separation of Church and State], demanded a writer in the Catholic Messenger. Why did Kennedy have to say anything? editors demanded. “We do not ask the Baptist President or the Presbyterian President or the Episcopalian President … to declare his stand on the Constitution,” said the Catholic Review. Why had not Protestants requested a statement of loyalty from Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson, a Mormon bishop?
Running through the Catholic reaction was a tinge of doubt over the desirability of having a Catholic candidate at all. “I would not be at all happy to have a Catholic as a candidate for President in the next election,” wrote one Monsignor. While he granted that prejudice in America had melted to the extent that a Catholic perhaps could be elected, he said that “bigotry is still so strong that the average Catholic candidate would feel he had to underplay not just Catholic but generally Christian ideas in order to ‘prove’ himself a ‘patriotic’ American.”
Kennedy was surprised by the vehemence of the Catholic criticism, as he might well have been; Al Smith’s similar statements had not met this reaction. He was also annoyed; “academic toe-dancing,” he called some of the editorial comments. “They ask whether I really mean that my oath of office comes above my conscience. Well, of course, there’s no conflict. It’s part of your conscience to meet your oath.” In retrospect he was pleased, though, that the issue had been debated so early. “I can now say that at least I’ve answered any reasonable question,” he has said. So critical were some Catholics of Kennedy’s position that the old friend of his family Richard Cardinal Cushing of Boston came to his defense. “… From my personal knowledge of him I can say without hesitation that Senator Kennedy will always perform his public duties to the highest standards of conscience and his oath of office.”
Protestant leaders cautiously approved Kennedy’s views. “A courageous stand,” said POAU’s Associate Director C. Stanley Lowell. Commendably forthright, declared the Christian Century—but only a beginning. The main trouble, Protestant spokesmen asserted, lay in the claim of the Roman Catholic Church to be the one true church, and its refusal to accept the secular, pluralistic basis of American life and the separation of church and state in law. To be sure, the Church departed from its more rigid precepts as a matter of expediency to meet practical situations. But its cardinal position was its exclusive claim to the total spiritual allegiance of its members. How could questions of political conduct be cut apart from this allegiance? In short, would not the Catholic Church, given its basic doctrine, have some claim on a Catholic President no matter what his sincerity and his protestations?
To discuss such problems face to face, the fifty-one man Council of Methodist Bishops, convening in Washington in April 1959, invited Kennedy to meet with it. “Boy, that’s Daniel going into the lions’ den!” a Washington reporter said, as Kennedy entered the Senate Office Building room where the bishops had gathered. Although the Council interviewed other presidential candidates, Kennedy was the only one asked about church-state matters.
“I am a strong Catholic and I come from a strong Catholic family,” Kennedy told them. “But I regret the fact that some people get the idea that the Catholic Church favors a Church-State tie.” What about the persecution of Protestants in Catholic Spain? he was asked. “I deplore a loss of liberty under any circumstances …” Kennedy said. “I am opposed to forced conversions.” The bishops, it was reported, applauded him warmly at the end.
Some Catholics were vexed by what Time called the “odd inquisition.” Protestants would have been “screaming bloody murder were the Catholic Bishops to do the same thing,” John Cogley declared in Commonweal. But Kennedy has never objected to the raising of the religious question, or to the way in which it is raised. Once, when a reporter cautiously introduced the subject and said, “I feel it is an unpleasant one—,” Kennedy interrupted him: “I don’t think it is unpleasant at all.”
What Kind of Catholic?
Not unpleasant—except when he is catalogued in terms of a religious stereotype. Kennedy hates being pigeonholed under any encasing label such as “liberal” or “conservative”—and this extends to the term “Catholic.” Thus he denies that his Catholicism implies obligations that would make it impossible or difficult for him,
as President, to enforce the Constitution as interpreted by the Supreme Court. He believes that the Catholic Church is not a monolithic organization, that there is room in that Church for many points of view, and that the Catholic public official is not a slave to ecclesiastical political views. The Senator has been criticized by Catholic officials for trying to relegate religion to “private life”; he answers that he is perfectly willing to admit the claims on him of broader Catholic (and Judeo-Christian) doctrines such as expressed in the Ten Commandments. Like anyone else, he has a conscience. But he denies that he would respond to any effort by Catholic Church authorities to control his public actions, or, indeed, that such efforts would be made.
“The Pope speaks as the head of the Catholic Church. My faith is a personal matter and it doesn’t seem to be conceivable, in fact it is impossible, that my obligation as one sworn to defend and uphold the Constitution could be changed in any manner by anything the Pope could say or do. What church I go to on Sunday, what dogma of the Catholic Church I believe in is my business and whatever faith any other American has is his business.”
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