Religion & Politics
John F. Kennedy and American Catholicism.
by Lawrence H. Fuchs.
Meredith Press. 271 pp. $6.95.
In accepting his party's nomination for the Presidency, John F. Kennedy told the Democratic convention delegates: “I hope that no American, considering the really critical issues facing this country, will waste his franchise and throw away his vote by voting either for me or against me solely on account of my religious affiliation.”
The hope was a noble one, but vain. According to the Survey Research Center of the University of Michigan, Kennedy's loss from Protestant Democrats who defected ran to at least 4,500,000 votes, substantially more than the number of Catholic Republicans who switched to the Democratic side. Numerically, then, Kennedy was hurt, but his religion also helped where it counted most heavily, in the big-city states with heavy Catholic populations and many electoral votes. The question, then, of whether the religious issue hurt or helped JFK will probably be debated for years.
Here to shed light on the debate, and in the process to say some enlightening things about Catholicism, is Lawrence Fuchs's John F. Kenedy and American Catholicism. Mr. Fuchs is already known for his Political Behavior of American Jews, and he seems equally at home in analyzing the political behavior of non-Jews, Catholic and otherwise.
Already the sound and the fury of the 1960 elections are dying away, and it is good to have some of the central facts and underlying issues in one place. Mr. Fuchs is primarily an analyst, rather than a reporter. (He has some trouble with names, about which journalists are trained to be careful; the Protestant journal is Christianity and Crisis, not Christianity in Crisis, as he has it; the very able Senator Eugene McCarthy is from Minnesota, not Wisconsin; the French theologian is Henri de Lubac, not de Lubbec; I am quoted correctly, but in the text my name has been anglicized to James O. Garrick and in the chapter notes has been changed to O'Garrick. But these are small matters.) Because Mr. Fuchs is analyst rather than reporter, we get intellectual dissection of the importance of the Houston speech, for example, rather than the flavor of that lion-before-the-Christians occasion. We learn that Father John Courtney Murray and John Cogley (formerly an editor of Commonweal) were among JFK's advisers on the religious issue, but we are not told who in fact drafted the Houston speech. We have solid description of the historic roots of anti-Catholic prejudice in America, which is valuable for those not already familiar with it, but no report on the reaction of heavily Catholic big-city dwellers to the TV reruns of Kennedy on the grill in Houston. But if Mr. Fuchs writes from the academic rather than the journalistic world, he deserves our thanks for what he has done rather than criticism for what he has not.
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It is not easy to recapture those heady days when John F. Kennedy tried to win, first the nomination, then the Presidency, and obviously those of us who are Catholics saw the issue in terms far different from those of Protestants or Jews. Some Catholics regretted that Kennedy was nominated simply because his nomination did raise the religious issue. They cited the dark days of Maria Monk and convent-burning, not so long past; they argued that anti-Catholic prejudice was just below the surface and should not be stirred up. The religious question helped to defeat Al Smith, they reasoned, and a Kennedy candidacy would only exacerbate old wounds.
Other Catholics were equally convinced that the religious issue had to be faced. Kennedy spoke for them when he asked: “Are we to admit to the world—worse still, are we to admit to ourselves—that one third of our population is forever barred from the White House?” At their mother's knee they had learned the time-honored dictum of American politics that any male American could aspire to the Presidency, as long as he was white, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant, but they refused to accept it. They agreed with Kennedy who said: “If there is bigotry in the country so great as to prevent fair consideration of a Catholic who has made clear his complete independence . . . then we ought to know it. But I do not believe this is the case. I believe the American people are much more concerned with a man's views and abilities than with the Church to which he belongs.”
Those Catholics who did not fear or regret Kennedy's nomination fell, again, into two categories. The average Catholic really did not know what all the fuss was about. He had one interest in the matter: to put an end to second-class citizenship. No matter what others thought, he was loyal to the nation and always had been—if anything, he was too loyal. A believer in a religion that transcends national boundaries, he worshipped all too easily at the shrines of social acceptability and the flag. The real problem for him, as for many non-Catholic Christians as well, was that he too seldom said “No” to the state; not disloyalty but excessive nationalism was likely to be his besetting sin, as Cardinal Spellman's comments on Vietnam surely demonstrate.
Many ordinary Catholics, therefore, regarded any questions put to Kennedy on the religious issue as bigotry and an insult. Catholics who were knowledgeable about Church and State had no such feeling. They knew American Catholics had always been loyal to the nation, and that the American bishops as a body had solemnly pledged their complete devotion to the Constitution, including the First Amendment. At the same time, they knew about the Syllabus of Errors, with its harsh comments on liberalism and progress, about Pope Leo XIII and his plea for a favored position for the Church, about the Index of Prohibited Books. They were convinced that any Catholic candidate had to make his attitude on such matters known; only after John F. Kennedy had done so time and time again did they come to believe that for a certain part of the population no Catholic was acceptable. Then and only then were these Catholics prepared to cry bigotry.
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Explanation of his position on Church and State Kennedy certainly gave—so much so, in fact, that some Protestants began to fear that he was overly secular and perhaps irreligious. Presbyterian Robert McAfee Brown said Kennedy's statements had demonstrated “that he is a rather irregular Christian.” Christian Century associate editor Martin Marty saw Kennedy as “spiritually rootless and politically almost disturbingly secular.” Such comments reflect what the campaign clearly demonstrated: to state with precision exactly what is due to Caesar and what to God is not easy, especially in the heat of electioneering. Certainly the 1960 campaign did not settle all questions, by any means. Would Harvard-man Kennedy have won if he had attended parochial schools and a Catholic university? I doubt it—indeed, the suspicion will not down that many people voted for Kennedy precisely because they thought he was not a very good Catholic—hardly a comforting thought.
Let us hope, though, that the issue is pretty much settled now anyhow—thanks to the two Catholic Johns, John F. Kennedy and Pope John XXIII. In Washington, the first John demonstrated that he could be an impartial President when it came to religion—perhaps more so than a non-Catholic; Kennedy, after all, opposed a Vatican ambassadorship, something Baptist Harry Truman favored, and aid for parochial schools, which LBJ got through. At the same time in Rome the second John won the affection of all; he saluted Jews as his brothers and showed us all the meaning of the term “pastor of the world.” Most importantly, Pope John convoked Vatican Council II, which moved the Church into the modern world and officially proclaimed freedom and religious liberty as Church teaching; thus the Council laid to rest, hopefully for once and for all, the fears raised in American hearts by the 19th-century Syllabus of Errors and all the rest of it. The two Johns go well together, as Mr. Fuchs rightly points out, and we owe them both a great debt. Our thanks should also go to Mr. Fuchs, who has captured the essential meaning of the two men so well.
