Where the News Ends:

...The only answer, in terms of American ideals and traditions, is: Yes...

...Chances are that a Kennedy-Nixon race would be close and would bring out a big vote, as did the Hoover-Smith contest...

...A Protestant Democrat might easily have been routed, as Cox was in 1920 and Davis in 1924...

...The Constitution excludes any religious test for office...

...Deplorable though it may be, religious sympathies and antipathies are playing an important role in American political life today and will continue and probably intensify until and unless John F. Kennedy is eliminated as a Democratic candidate for the Presidency...

...Elizabeth I executed Jesuit priests not because she was a fanatical opponent of transubstantiation or any other Catholic doctrine, but because some priests were working to overthrow what they considered her heretical and usurping rule...

...But it would not be surprising if, in a close race, the issue were decided, however regrettably, by one simple fact: whether more Americans are influenced by Kennedy's religion to vote for him or against him...

...Some of the hysterical fear that a Catholic President would get his orders every week in a sealed envelope from the Vatican may be traced to a belated and now quite irrelevant hangover from the 16th and 17th centuries when Catholic minorities in Protestant countries and Protestant minorities in Catholic-countries sometimes represented potential fifth columns...

...As it happens, the 33 individuals who have been Presidents have been Protestants, with the possible exception of Thomas Jefferson, who was pretty much a free-thinking Deist, and have also been of English or North European ethnic stock...

...with a cum laude degree from Harvard and a habit of sprinkling his speeches with highbrow quotes from Goethe to Santayana, would not face this handicap...

...My answer was— and is—'No.' " It is sometimes assumed that the experience of Al Smith proves a Catholic candidate cannot be elected...

...The question whether a Catholic can be elected President will probably remain unanswered unless Kennedy is the Democratic nominee...

...Never, except in the imagination of the lunatic fringe of anti-Catholic hatemongers (they divide the ugly work of religious defamation with professional anti-Semites), has the Vatican interfered in American foreign and domestic policy...

...Senator Kennedy could cite many votes in his own legislative record (opposing the appointment of an envoy to the Vatican, opposing Federal aid to parochial schools, supporting aid to Tito's Yugoslavia) to back up his repudiation of the idea that he is "the Catholic candidate...

...Moreover, Smith, along with many admirable traits as a progressive man, had certain "Sidewalks of New York" mannerisms of speech and dress calculated to rub rural and small-town communities the wrong way...

...I have answered that question many times...

...At no time in American history, however, have American Catholics behaved in such a way as to bring a shadow of doubt on their loyalty, patriotism and devotion to American laws and the Constitution...

...Kennedy was both helped and hurt by this fact, probably more helped than hurt in this particular state...

...To quote Kennedy's own words: "There is only one legitimate question underlying all the rest: Would you, as President of the United States, be responsive in any way to ecclesiastical pressures or obligations of any kind that might in any fashion influence or interfere with your conduct of that office in the national interest...

...But dogmatic certainty seems ruled out by two considerations...

...Should a Catholic, if he is the best qualified man for the office, be eligible for the Presidency...

...There was the same combined threat when Louis XIV of France sent James II to Ireland with the support of a French army and would have once more placed the exiled Catholic Stuart monarch on the throne of England had his resources been equal to the task...

...Kennedy, the "Irish Boston Brahmin...

...No amount of explanation and rationalization can obscure the fact that there was a good deal of voting along religious lines in the Wisconsin primary...

...But there is no reason in law or democratic logic why a Catholic, a Jew, an agnostic or a man of Irish, Italian, Polish or other parentage should be excluded if he can convince the majority of his fellow citizens that he is the best man for the job...

...No subject is so sure to elicit a large crop of letters-to-the-editor as whether a Catholic should occupy the White House...

...First, Smith was running under unfavorable circumstances against a strong candidate whose prestige as an independent above party politics was high, and in a period of soaring stock prices and riproaring, if spotty and superficial, prosperity...

...Other issues besides Kennedy's religion would, of course, enter into the picture...

...The threat to British religion and institutions was made real by the Armada of the Most Catholic King, Philip II of Spain...