The changing face of Catholic candidates

We guess that this heading will be interpreted by some of our readers as a comment on the electoral campaign that we have just gone through. We think that we have had enough of that for the moment and so would like to look at what is happening elsewhere.

In these columns we already discussed on more than one occasion the controversy raging in the United States about whether to give or withhold communion to certain politicians. Today we look at a different facet of the relationship between politicians and the Church with particular reference to the US.

Forty-four years ago Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts ran for President in 1960. He faced a barrage of questions from a predominantly Protestant public, like: "How do we know you can separate your Catholic beliefs from your political responsibilities?"

Today another senator from Massachusetts, John F. Kerry, is seeking the Presidency. This time he is being questioned by Catholics who ask him to justify why he doesn't pay more attention to the Church in how he votes - specifically regarding his support of legislation to keep abortion legal and minimally regulated, when the Church firmly opposes abortion.

In recent Senate votes, Kerry has opposed bills to ban partial-birth abortion, supported efforts to lift the prohibition on abortions at US military installations overseas, and supported a resolution affirming that Roe vs Wade was correctly decided.

All those positions were contrary to those supported by the Church. The National Right to Life Committee says he votes with their preferred position 0 per cent of the time.

This situation is a first in US presidential politics. As we just noted, the situation at the time of the Kennedy nomination was different. It was also very different in 1928 - the only time, before Kennedy, that a Catholic had been a major party's nominee for the Presidency.

New York Governor Al Smith lost the 1928 election largely because of his stance against Prohibition. But overt anti-Catholic rhetoric also was a factor in his defeat.

Suspicion of Catholics lingered 32 years later, when Kennedy set his sights on the White House. The Southern Baptist Convention unanimously passed a resolution voicing doubts that Kennedy or any Catholic should be President. Another statement - signed by 150 Protestant ministers and laymen headed by the Rev. Norman Vincent Peale - said a Catholic President would be under "extreme pressure from the hierarchy of his Church" to align US foreign policy with that of the Vatican, noted author Thomas Maier in a 2003 book, The Kennedys: America's Emerald Kings.

Kennedy could not ignore this anti-Catholic sentiment. In a televised September 1960 speech to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association he described his belief "in an America where the separation of Church and state is absolute - where no Catholic prelate would tell the President (should he be Catholic) how to act and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote".

Kennedy asked voters to judge him on his political record, not on the basis of carefully selected "quotations out of context from the statements of Church leaders, usually in other countries, frequently in other centuries and always omitting, of course, the statement of the American bishops in 1948 which strongly endorsed Church-state "separation". He said he was not "the Catholic candidate for president. I am the Democratic Party's candidate for president, who happens also to be Catholic. I do not speak for my Church on public matters - and the Church does not speak for me."

Kennedy's efforts to separate his religion from his elected role in a pluralistic society weren't universally popular among Catholics, however. He was often accused of bending over backwards to show he would do Catholics no special favours. The editor of The Register of the Diocese of Kansas City-St Joseph in Missouri, "suggests that a man who accepts office in the United States is no longer the keeper of his own conscience. If this is American doctrine, I'm leaving for Tahiti."

It seems that Kennedy started the race in the good books of all Catholics but when his Presidency came to its tragic end he was not enjoying the Catholic support as much as he did at the beginning of his presidency.

Following the Kennedy experiment both parties tried to include a Catholic on the ballot as a vice-presidential candidate in the elections from 1964 to 1972. These efforts did not meet any success.

Since then issues became more complex, especially since the legalisation of abortion. Many Catholic politicians were saying: "I'm personally opposed to abortion, but I don't believe I should legislate my beliefs when abortion is legal in this country."

In 1990 Cardinal O'Connor said such justifications from Catholic politicians put them at risk of excommunication by "treating Church teaching on abortion with contempt". He said such an approach is "helping to multiply abortions by advocating legislation supporting abortion, or by making public funds available for abortion".

This year the debate is not whether such politicians should be or should not be excommunicated but whether or not they should be allowed to receive Communion.

Kerry answers such criticism saying: "I believe in the Church and I care about it enormously. But I think that it's important to not have the Church instructing politicians. That is an inappropriate crossing of the line in America."

There are many who disagree.