Joe Biden, Pre-Conciliar Catholic? | George Weigel | First Things
Some biographers suggest that JFK became more religiously serious after his infant son Patrick s death in 1963. I certainly hope that was the case. For most of his life, however, Catholicism for John Fitzgerald Kennedy seems to have been less a matter of deep personal conversion than an ethnic marker sometimes useful, sometimes troublesome, but always irradicable. Kennedy regularly performed what were then known as his religious duties. But their impact on his manner of life appears to have been minimal, and he had no grasp of Catholic political theory.
Speaking on Church-and-state to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association during the 1960 presidential campaign, Kennedy did American Catholicism a service by masterfully arraigning those who continued to indulge in that venerable American pastime, anti-Catholic bigotry: prejudices rooted in an ignorance that was amply displayed by the Protestant ministers who challenged JFK during the Houston meeting s Q&A session. But Kennedy put the bigots in the dock by getting as much distance as possible between himself and serious Catholic thinking on school choice and religious conviction s role in the public square, while seeming to acknowledge the possibility of a pope trying to boss around a Catholic president which was about as likely in 1960 as the Vatican launching a manned mission to the moon.