What the controversy was with John F. Kennedy being a Catholic?

Answer 1

There was an initial worry by some people that having Kennedy in the White House would give the Pope and the Catholic Church carte blanche in directing Kennedy's decisionmaking in governing the nation. However, then-Presidential candidate Kennedy repeatedly made his opinion on the subject very clear in various national interviews throughout the 1960 Presidential campaign. His interview on the subject on Face the Nation on October 30, 1960, was perhaps the most publicly promulgated. During a press conference on Sep 12, 1960 in Houston, TX, then-candidate Kennedy made the following statement: "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." There is also a series of additional quotes regarding President Kennedy's stance on the issue here: http://www.adherents.com/people/pk/John_F_Kennedy.html.

The fears of U.S. voters with regard to Kennedy's faith, while understandable, were unfounded in any case, as they were based on obsolete and antiquated notions of the Catholic Church's relationships with nations that proclaimed themselves to be "Catholic" by virtue of their constitutions. The Church had lost power with the secular political consolidation of the last of the Vatican city states which became the nation of Italy by end of the 19th century. By 1960, the Church had long been out of the business of politically governing any nation but Vatican City in Rome. By the beginning of the 20th century, the Church changed how it sought to influence people and nations no longer using political methods, but chiefly through appeal to reason and intellect.

Answer 2

To understand the problem that the nation had with John F. Kennedy running for president was based in the very foundation of this nation as a sovereign nation. The United States was settled by the Puritans and other Protestant refugees from Europe who came to these shores for the specific purpose of getting away from the Catholic Church and even anything that vaguely looked like the Catholic Church (i.e. the Protestant Church of England).

It was so bad in the beginning that even the one state specifically founded as a refugee for Catholics fleeing from Europe - Maryland, turned and actually ended up enacting specifically anti-Catholic laws and statues. The animosity toward the Church that Christ founded actually grew in the 19th century, especially as more Catholics fleeing from Ireland in droves came into the United States. In my living memory monks at the Benedictine motherhouse in the United States - St. Vincent Archabbey in Pennsylvania were arrested on the street if they had the temerity to actually go into town wearing their religious habit - and it was only in the very late 20th century that this law was finally removed from the books!

Americans, as a nation, had along distrust of Catholics, and the ethnic minorities who came to these shores that were Catholic. My parents grew up in the early 20th century in western Pennsylvania - in an area where there was a large Catholic population - there were nearly a dozen Catholic churches in my hometown when I was small (in the 1950's), and my parents were themselves a mixed marriage, my father was a lapsed Catholic who was from a mixed marriage - his mother's family had come from Ireland in the second half of the 19th century, and his father's family had come over on the Mayflower. My mother's family had been in the United States for a couple centuries, and was obviously very Protestant.

The problem that many saw with John F. Kennedy was based on misunderstandings and prejudice. Even those who actually knew of Catholics did not look on them as fully American but the rumor mill had it that their allegiance was ultimately to a foreign prince (the Pope in Rome) and that they couldn't be trusted with our precious American freedoms.

The Catholics, on the other hand, from their Bishops, sought to be more American then the Americans, and ended up losing - in large part - their faith, as they became "Catholic Americans" which was specifically condemned by the Popes as a heresy - the heresy of Americanism. The Catholics sought a wrong answer to this distrust, and lost their faith in the process. In the early 1960's they were just beginning to lose their faith, and Americans still did not trust them to hold places of power. In addition, the Masons, which were historically vehemently anti-Catholic, used their influence in the upper levels of government to remove Christianity from the nation as a whole, and Catholicism in particular.

Answer 3

American Protestants were concerned that Kennedy might take direction from the Pope.