Kennedy and the Catholic Church

[Extract] The relationship between U.S. politics and institutional forms of religion has always been problematic, since the United States itself has one of the highest rates of church attendance of any Western country, but the First Amendment of its Constitution insists that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” This Constitution, framed controversially as it was during an era of Enlightenment skepticism, was viewed askance by many church leaders in the early republic, but various American presidents, from George Washington to Kennedy’s immediate predecessor, Dwight D. Eisenhower, have attempted to reconcile this apparent anomaly by bringing to office an air of vague piety without exercising themselves unduly about any specific sectarian end.1 The majority of American presidents have been nominally Episcopalian or Presbyterian in their denominational affiliation, with Methodists, Baptists, and Unitarians also well represented. To this day, John F. Kennedy has been the only serving American president who was also a practicing Catholic, and this fact in itself says something about the often tense and fractious relationship between U.S. culture and the Roman Catholic religion.