We should have told John F. Kennedy to stuff it. . . and we still can.
So runs an opinion headline in the Washington Post.
Well, as the sage Bart Simpson would have it, au contraire, mon fraire.
Or more accuaratley, I suppose ma soeur, as the author is Karen Tumulty.
The article by Tumulty is completely unoriginal, I'd note, with no brilliant insights whatsoever. Rather, it follows the standard line of thought on this noting John F. Kennedy's 1960 address to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association, who were all Southern Baptists. Kennedy, as Tumulty and others have noted, famously stated:
I believe 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; where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference; and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the president who might appoint him or the people who might elect him.
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.
This speech has been hailed again and again as brilliant strategic move by Kennedy, which it truly was. But the overall impact, on a really cosmic scale, has rarely been analyzed.
It may have been good for Kennedy, but it was a disaster for Catholics, and continues to be. What the US Bishops are doing in some ways is reacting to that disaster, but only at the pint at which they almost have no choice but to do so.
Let's start with Kennedy himself. He was a Sunday and Holy Day Mass going Catholic and part of an extended Catholic family, but not too surprisingly his own family bore little resemblance to the the Irish Catholics of the Catholic Ghetto who identified with him due to his Irish surname. The Kennedy's were, and are, extremely wealthy and while as Catholics they were on the periphery of American life, they were on it in the way that wealthy Catholics could be as any member of a minority who was wealthy could be. I.e., they were part of the in crowed in significant ways.
And as a member of that elite group John F. Kennedy carved for himself liberties that the Catholic faith never sanctioned, and he did so promiscuously literally. Kennedy had a string of affairs that went beyond that which a person might normally be tempted to somewhat trying to excuse away. He wasn't Franklin Roosevelt with a long time paramour, something inexcusable but at least not libertine.
Indeed, under modern definitions, at least one of his affairs in the White House started with what moderns would be tempted to regard as a sort of rape. It's debatable whether this category is truly applicable or not, but it was shockingly disgusting. His behavior here, however, didn't stop with that, in regard to this individual, who descended pretty quickly into shocking behavior more expansively.
We'll forgo detailing this more as its not necessary to this entry. The point is that knowing what we now know about Kennedy, his willingness to make such a statement really ought to be put in a different light. If he was declaring that he'd never let his religion directly dictate his actions, well, he wasn't in regard to personal behavior in a significant way, already.
This isn't an attempt to judge the state of Kennedy's soul at the time of his death. We don't know that. But what we can say is that in regard to his overall character, Kennedy really wasn't whom he seemed to be.
And frankly, the statement wasn't that bold. Catholic leaders of numerous nations had been in power in various places (including, we might note, Rome) since before the time of Constantine the Great. The Church had never laid claim to a right to tell leaders how to rule, which was the real fear that the Southern Baptists at the time had. Much has changed in regard to how Protestants view Catholics since 1960s, but some evangelical Protestants at the time, and now, held highly erroneous views of how the Pope's relationship to average Catholics, including politicians, worked. Indeed, the political cartoon with the Pope directly pulling the strings of American Catholic politicians was a common feature of political debate up until the mid 20th Century.
The irony was that in 2020 the average Catholic is a lot more in tune with the Pope's views, in knowing what they are, than in 1960s, even though the way the Church actually works seems to be no more clear now than as opposed to then. The current example is a good one in this regard. The Pope seems concerned that the US Bishops are going this direction. The US Bishops are going this direction anyhow. The Pope hasn't stopped them. This is pretty typical over the ages. When the Pope actually acts in regard to local Bishops, something has usually gone wrong on an extreme level.
And so too with politicians, as for the papacy. And this overall situation is highly instructive.
Since the Second World War there's been a lot of attacks on the Papacy of Pope Pius XII, even though the actual historical record shows him to have done a remarkably good job during the crisis and the attacks against him unmerited and, to some degree, to have originated in a post war Communist smear campaign. The Pope did speak against the Nazis during, and before, the war, in the form of proclamations on moral matters with the most noted being Mit Brennender Sorge. Often forgotten is that some of the most direct attacks on the Nazi regime, however, came from the German Catholic Bishops themselves, one such example resulting in the White Rose movement.
What the Church didn't do is to issue a list of instructions to Catholics in power on "do this". It did provide stout moral guidance, however. It is of note here that in both the White Rose instance, and the July 20 plot, the prime movers were Catholics and Catholics were heavily represented.
How's this relate to what we're now seeing?
Well, pretty heavily.
In 1960s, when Kennedy gave his speech, the social issues that exist today and which are so much in the forefront, didn't. No fault divorce didn't exist until 1970. Abortion was just coming in as a state issue and didn't become the forced law of the land until 1973's Roe v. Wade. The millennia old definition of marriage was completely unchallenged anywhere.
Things were moving, to be sure, and that should have been a warning. The Kinsey report started being popularized right after World War Two and was given serious treatment even though the statistical methodology was grossly inaccurate and the conduct used to generate the badly skewed data heavily skewed. This played right into the hands of a new breed of pornographer lead by Hugh Hefner. Starting in the 1950s an assault on conventional sexual morality commenced that would explode in the 1960s, but this wasn't obvious to most Catholics. The warnings were there, but they were not fully nor naturally appreciated.
Given this, in the enthusiasm that there might be a Catholic President, most Catholics joined the bandwagon and the Church didn't pull Kennedy in and say "be careful". After all, he wasn't really saying anything that generally shocked Catholics in any fashion in the context of the times. Charles DeGaulle was a sincere and devout Catholic, for example, and nobody had any thought that the Bishops in France or the Pope was running France.
This would have been harmless enough, and still would be, but for the fact that very rapidly Catholics adopted, due to Kennedy and his speech, something that many evangelical Protestants never did, which was the concept of a completely personal separation of Church and State. Where as everyone agrees that there should be no state church, many in the evangelical Protestant community do believe that a person's faith should fully inform their political conduct. Many Catholics do as well, with most sincere ones believing that, but Kennedy's massive popularity, combined with the concept of his being an Irish Catholic, caused average American Catholics to believe that a full separation was a okay. I.e, as long as I don't personally engage in . . . . it doesn't matter what others do.
The Church has never believed that in any form. The declarations during World War Two show that. It was never the case that the Church took the view that individual Germans could participate in the atrocities of the Third Reich and have a clean moral conscience as long as they had purity of heart. Knowing that is what caused some to attempt tyrannicide. But in the United States, which had no such overarching moral issue at the time, and where Catholics were on the side of liberal civil rights efforts, it was easy for things to became blurred pretty quickly.
By the 1970s there were liberal Catholic religious in political office. And liberal Catholics began to side with things that seemed to square with at least some aspects of Catholic thought. Where as some Catholic clerics had urged Catholics to participate in the fighting in Vietnam in the U.S. military early on, as it was a struggle against Communism, some Catholic clerics were openly opposing it by the late 1960s. And you can see how either view can be squared with the Faith.
But what never could be were developments in social issues that attacked marriage and the nature of sexual conduct, and which were contrary to Catholic views on the sanctity of life. None the less, acclimated by the 1970s to a personal separation of Church and State, and being Catholic only on Sunday, lots of Catholic politicians went right along with these developments. Pretty soon, in the tumult of the times, and with other developments inside the Church itself in the 1960s, average Catholics also did.
Unexercised muscles atrophy. But failing to exercise for somebody who has, doesn't come overnight. Any single man who used to have an exercise routine is probably aware of that. The pressures of life and busy schedules, and just the thought that you'll stay home and watch TV lead to a situation sooner or later in which the former athlete has put on fifty pounds and is pretty tired just getting through the day.
Moral authority works the same way. Things that should have been said decades ago weren't, and after awhile an entire body of Catholics convinces themselves that they're really good and observant Catholics even while omitting anything the Faith that's personally difficult. Any Catholic with Catholic associates knows this.
At some point, however, there's a point at which you reach that you have no choice. A person has a heart attack and is sent home with doctor's instructions. People who smoke are told to knock it off. You get the point.
And with moral authority, you reach some point where you have to exercise it as you have no other moral choice. That's where we are, and that's what I noted the other day in this entry:
Lex Anteinternet: A Corrective Warning.: We started off to comment on a couple of newsworthy items from the Catholic news sphere the other day but like a lot of things here, we only...
The Pope is saying be careful. He isn't saying don't. That's up to the Catholic Bishops in the United States. And looking at where we are now, they really have no choice but to act.
Individual Catholics, of course, also have individual free will. The history of the world shows that people make difficult choices only when somebody is backing them up, and only when others are obviously doing the same. There are exceptions, but those exceptions are heroic for that very reason, they're exceptions against the tide. Observant orthodox Catholics have nearly been that exception for some time now, but things seem to swinging around to them.
Standing in their way, really, is the generation that came up in the 1960s, or just behind them. A lot of them have had nice lives riding the high point of American economic exceptualism, an era that's now really over, and are really not in tune with the world as it is. They're comfortable with the American Civil Religion, which is basically Christian as long as it isn't too hard, and which still, in spite of the Trump assault on democracy, holds that God basically listens to our vote on thing where we find it too hard. As Catholics, they've acclimated themselves to the erroneous belief that they can omit big chunks of the Faith, as they have for so long.
That isn't Catholic, however.
The Church never acts very quickly. So what the US Bishops will do, they won't do until fall. That gives Joe Biden, who attends Mass every Sunday and on Holy Days, and who is openly Catholic, lots of time to comport his conduct to the tenants of the Faith. But like men who go home from the hospital with instructions not to smoke, not to drink and exercise, that won't be easy. Physicians state that most people don't actually clean up their personal health issues, but simply carry on. And that doesn't involve the issue of pride that comes with decades of going down a certain political path that now needs to be corrected.
A path that John F. Kennedy started us out on.
