Could a Catholic be elected president? Forty-seven years after the election of John F. Kennedy, and with a gaggle of Catholic candidates seeking the nominations of both political parties, that may sound like the kind of question Rip Van Winkle would ask. But hold on. There's a lot more here than meets the eye at first.
Start with the fact that John Kennedy's much-discussed Catholic problem was actually a problem with non-Catholics whose bigotry caused them to mistrust a politician belonging to the Roman Church. In the eyes of Catholics, by contrast, Kennedy could do no wrong. Here was a glamorous coreligionist who'd married (once) in the Church and had a handsome family, who visibly went to Mass, and who didn't overtly flout the teachings of his Church. What more could a Catholic voter ask?
Kennedy was lucky as well as smart. His famous talk to the ministers in Houston got him off the hook with many Protestants. True, he said in effect that religion wouldn't influence his conduct in office, but at the time that was what many people wanted to hear.
On the Catholic front, he was fortunate in having no compelling need to confront issues — aid to nonpublic schools being a notable exception — that were likely to place him seriously at odds with his Church.
Plainly, that would not be true today. Now he would have to take a stand on sensitive matters like abortion, fetal stem cell research, and same-sex marriage. And what would he do then?
In fairness to Kennedy, it must be said that there's no answering a what-if question like that one. But, granting that's so, it is not unfair to imagine an updated scenario paralleling today's political scene in which Kennedy, as a moderate-to-liberal Democrat, would part company with the Church on issues like the ones mentioned above. After all, his youngest brother, Ted, has done that for years.
Now, let's further imagine that Kennedy had faced off with the Church on comparable issues back in 1960. In that case it seems probable that his support among Catholics — a whopping 78%, as it turned out — would have taken a hit. And if that had happened, the setback might very well have cost him what was in fact a very close election. Imagine the Catholic vote for Kennedy had come in a few percentage points lower in the key state of Illinois: not even Mayor Daley might have been able to close the gap, and Kennedy would have lost.
That (hypothetically) was then. And today? Even though splitting with the Church might have cost John Kennedy the election in 1960, it's hardly clear a Catholic candidate would pay the same price now. Indeed, several of the current Catholic contenders are already engaged in doing so, at no visible cost to their candidacies.
That has more to do with changes in the Catholic electorate than in Catholic politicians. Catholic voters now fall into three very large categories — those who practice their religion, those who don't, and those who waver back and forth somewhere in between. (It's the same situation you find in baseball — avid fans, those who couldn't care less, and people who ignore the regular season but follow the World Series.)
Some see this seismic shift as the maturing of American Catholics, others as a sign of a sharply eroded Catholic identity among large numbers of the faithful. Could a Catholic be elected president today? Certainly. But depending on who the candidate was, that mightn't be good news for the Church.
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