Protestant Clergy Vs. the Catholic Candidate, JFK

“I not only don’t believe in voicing prejudice,” said President Eisenhower at his press conference last week, “I want to assure you that I feel none. And I am sure that Mr. Nixon feels exactly the same . . . Mr. Nixon and I agreed long ago that one thing we would never raise is the religious issue in this campaign . . . I would hope that religion could be one of those subjects that could be laid on the shelf and forgotten until after the election is over.”

At the moment that the President was talking, 150 Protestant clergymen and laymen, calling themselves the Citizens for Religious Freedom, were meeting behind closed doors several blocks away in Washington’s Mayflower Hotel. Their purpose: to dedicate themselves to the proposition that Jack Kennedy’s Roman Catholicism would by no means be forgotten as an election issue. At the close of their session, they issued a 2,000-word manifesto that more than any other statement thus far in the campaign served to make religion the most emotional issue of the 1960 election.

The churchmen met privately, refused to list the names of those who attended.

But reporters quickly identified two prominent leaders:

¶ Dr. Daniel Poling, 75, editor of the influential Protestant monthly, Christian Herald (circ.: 427,000), unsuccessful Republican candidate for mayor of Philadelphia in 1951, and an antagonist of Jack Kennedy’s since 1950. It was then that a building-fund dinner was held in Philadelphia for an interfaith chapel within the Grace Baptist Temple (Poling’s pulpit from 1936 to 1948) to be dedicated to the memory of the four famed Army chaplains who went down with the troopship Dorchester in 1943—including Poling’s own son, Lieut. Clark V. Poling. Congressman Kennedy accepted an invitation to speak, backed out at the last minute on advice from the Archdiocese of Philadelphia. Poling has never forgiven

Kennedy—and he has never let Protestants forget the incident.*

¶ Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, 62, a longstanding Republican whose Protestant following rivals Billy Graham’s as the largest in the U.S. His nationally syndicated column, Confident Living, appears in 196 newspapers. His radio show, The Art of Living, is broadcast on some 60 NBC stations. His monthly magazine, Guideposts, reaches far and wide across the land. His church, Manhattan’s Marble Collegiate, is filled to overflowing for each of his two Sunday sermons. He has sold more than 4,000,000 hard-covered copies of his books, e.g., The Power of Positive Thinking, A Guide to Confident Living.

Soft on Catholicism. Dr. Peale presided over the meeting, according to two eavesdropping reporters, John J. Lindsay of the Washington Post and Times-Herald and Bonnie Angelo of Long Island’s Newsday. “Our American culture is at stake,” said Peale. “I don’t say it won’t survive, but it won’t be what it was.”

Dr. L. Nelson Bell, executive editor of the biweekly Christianity Today (paid and free circ.: 160,000) and father-in-law of Billy Graham, was more alarmed. Too many Protestants, said he, are “soft” on Catholicism. “Pseudo tolerance is not tolerance at all but simply ignorance.” If Jack Kennedy were to become President, he said, then Montana’s Mike Mansfield would become Senate majority leader and Massachusetts’ John W. Mc-Cormack would continue as House Democratic floor leader. “Both are fine men, but both belong to a church with headquarters in Rome.” And to Bell, Rome was little better than Moscow: “The antagonism of the Roman church to Communism is in part because of similar methods.” Dr. Harold J. Ockenga, of Boston’s Park Street Church, compared Kennedy to Nikita Khrushchev, saying that each is “a captive of a system.”

“Wall of Separation.” Unanimously, the group adopted a declaration that had been largely framed beforehand—authors unknown. It was no less tough than the speeches, but more moderately expressed. In essence, it charged that the Vatican would sway any Catholic President in areas of foreign affairs, education and church-state relationships. “It is inconceivable,” said the statement, “that a Roman Catholic President would not be under extreme pressure by the hierarchy of his church to accede to its policies with respect to foreign relations, including representation to the Vatican … Is it reasonable to assume that a Roman Catholic President would be able to withstand altogether the determined efforts of the hierarchy to gain further funds and favors for its schools and institutions, and otherwise breach the wall of separation of church and state? . . .

“In various areas where they predominate,” said one fire-breathing passage, “Catholics have seized control of the public schools, staffed them with nun teachers wearing their church garb, and introduced the catechism and practices of their church. In Ohio today—a state with a Roman Catholic Governor—according to an attorney general’s ruling, Roman Catholic nuns and sisters may be placed on the public payroll as schoolteachers.”*

After hearing an appeal to raise $20,000 (to carry the message to the “grass roots”), the group selected Peale to meet the press. Warned a conferee: “Say one wrong word, and the press will murder us —by next week we’ll be out of business.” Peale made a joke: “Pray for us while we are talking to those reporters.” A soloist sang I Want to Be a Christian in My Heart, and Peale strode into the lions’ den of waiting newsmen. Why had the churchmen not criticized the fact that Richard Nixon is a Quaker? Said Peale: “I didn’t know that he ever let it bother him.”

Why were not such liberal theologians as Reinhold Niebuhr present? Answered

Peale: “If he were here, we’d never get anything done.”

Reaction came quickly from liberal Protestants who violently disagreed. Among them:

REINHOLD NIEBUHR, recently retired vice president of Manhattan’s Union Theological Seminary: “Dr. Peale and I disagree on everything, religiously and politically.”

JAMES A. PIKE, Protestant Episcopal Bishop of California: “Any argument which would rule out a Roman Catholic just because he is a Roman Catholic is both bigotry and a violation of the constitutional guarantee of no religious test for public office.”

PAUL TILLICH, Harvard theology professor: “I believe the time must come in which America must take the risk of having a Catholic candidate. Every election is a risk. Nixon would be a risk for other reasons.”

JOHN C. BENNETT, dean of the faculty at Union Theological Seminary: There exists a “Protestant underworld that stirs up undisguised hatred of Catholics. What kind of a country do these Protestants want—a country in which 40 million citizens feel that they are outsiders?”

The Peale-Poling manifesto was also swiftly condemned by the New York

Board of Rabbis, representing 700 Orthodox, Conservative and Reform rabbis.

Said its president. Rabbi David I. Golo-vensky: “Voting for a presidential candidate because he is a Catholic or vot ing against him because he belongs to the Catholic faith is a sinister betrayal of the fundamental precept of American democracy.” In the influential Jesuit weekly America, the Rev. John Courtney Murray, a front-rank Catholic theologian, said that “the oldest American prejudice. anti-Catholicism, is as poisonously alive today as it was in 1928, or even in the 1840s. My chief hope is that old Catholic angers will not rise. Now is the time for the tra dition of reason, which is the Catholic tradition, to assert itself.”

Nuances & Traps. Jack Kennedy’s headquarters rolled out tens of thousands of copies of Kennedy’s major statements on the religious issue, emphasizing that “the separation of church and state is fundamental to our American concept and heritage and should remain so.” While whistle-stopping through California, Kennedy hit the issue head on. “I do not accept the view that my church would place pressures on me,” he said. “The great struggle today is between those who believe in no God and those who believe in God.” He also accepted an invitation to address the Greater Houston Ministerial Alliance—in an eye of the anti-Catholic storm—and then submit to a televised question period this week.

Dick Nixon was in a tighter bind. While the religion issue could win him inroads in the South and Midwest, it could lose him the big Northern states—and the election —by welding the many Nixon-disposed Catholics of the cities and suburbs into a pro-Kennedy voting bloc. But there were nuances and traps of all kinds, for all sides, in the religion issue, and both Republicans and Democrats knew it.

*Kennedy’s side of the story: “A few days before the event, I learned that I was to be ‘the spokesman for the Catholic faith.’ I was not being invited as a former member of the armed services or as a member of Congress, or as an individual. I further learned that the memorial was to be located in the sanctuary of a church of a different faith. This is against the precepts of the Catholic Church. Because of this fact, the Archdiocese of Philadelphia was unable to support the drive. Therefore, I felt I had no credentials to attend in the capacity in which I had been asked.”

*The facts: in 1958, under Republican (and Protestant) Governor C. William O’Neill, Ohio Attorney General William B. Saxbe was asked to rule whether school boards could employ nuns to ease a grave teacher shortage. He ruled that they could indeed hire nuns (as they have been doing for 39 years), allow them to wear habits in class. Said Democratic (and Catholic) Governor Mike DiSalle, demanding an apology from Peale: “This matter has never been before me.”