May 23, 2004 - In 1960, the year I was eligible to cast my first vote for President, the issue that got the most attention after the usual minor questions of war and peace; poverty or prosperity; and recession or recovery was the issue raised by the Democratic candidate’s Roman Catholicism. If elected President would the Senator from Massachusetts be bound to follow the dictates of the Roman Catholic hierarchy in matters of public policy? The Republicans used it as a wedge issue across the Bible Belt arguing that the election of John Fitzgerald Kennedy would seat the Pope in the White House.

The Republicans are raising the “Religious Issue” again 44 years later, but with a different twist. They argue that electing John Forbes Kerry, the Senator from Massachusetts, will drive religion out of the political arena because he will not allow the same hierarchy to direct his positions on public issues. The antagonists of 1960, the fundamentalist Protestants and conservative Catholics, are now allies. The religious issue is not framed as whether the Catholic candidate will be in thrall to the Papal See as it was in 1960. Rather the question is asked whether the Catholic candidate’s refusal to impose Church dogma on the majority of Americans by incorporating it into the nation’s body of law should disqualify him from access to his Church’s most solemn rituals and, by extension, bar him from holding office for his failure to submit wholly to his Church hierarchy’s feudal discipline.

When Bishops announced that Catholic office holders who took positions against imposing Church doctrine on the rest of America should be denied Holy Communion and the Denver’s Bishop declared that voters who supported them should be similarly excommunicated in the New American Century, the Republican establishment embraced that medieval declaration. The “Religious Issue” of 1960 has been stood upon its head in a new intolerance for the New American Century – a return to the medieval concept that civil government exists as an extension of the Church subservient to the revealed word of God as interpreted by its clergy. The Republican call to reject Senator Kerry, embraced with enthusiasm by the fundamentalist Protestant clergy, is not grounded on his Catholicism; rather the complaint is that he is not Catholic enough!

In 1960 Jack Kennedy was able to effectively face his generation’s religious issue by distinguishing between privately held beliefs and his public duty to observe and respect the bright line dividing temporal government from ecclesiastical doctrine. Standing upon the foundation of the First Amendment his was able to overcome his generations call to incorporate religious intolerance into the electoral process. But in 1960 JFK faced a monolithic anti-Catholic religious bigotry that preached that the Papal See was the Whore of Babylon and Satan’s representative on Earth.