Catholics and the Presidency:

...Eisenhower, in addition to his aura as a war hero, did possess a charismatic gift of impressing himself upon people as a "decent'" human being who liked people and wanted to be liked...

...Ethnic and religious loyalties are only two of the many irrational and irrelevant considerations which effect the choices of voters...

...He thinks the Pope is the head of a great power structure and is a "foreign Sovereign" to whom you cannot owe fealty without betraying your country...

...For authoritarianism invests an elite with a monopoly of power and aggravates the natural foolishness of human passions and interests with the pride of power which, when not checked, becomes extravagant...

...That is the tendency to hold the Administration responsible for whatever prosperity or adversity the nation enjoys or suffers at the time of the election...

...Some of my secular friends assure me that Kennedy can be trusted because he is Catholic by tradition and not by deep devotion...

...For all we know, the Eisenhower popularity may be derived not only from the aura of a war hero and the charismatic gift of a decent man, but from the inclination to play down the perils of the nation and to interfere as little as possible with the supposed securities and comforts of an "affluent society...

...The religious issue is one form of irrelevance which prompts political judgments' Catholics and the Presidency By Reinhold Niebuhr THE WEST VIRGINIA primary will be held May 10 and we do not know how the religious issue will affect the vote...

...Considering the hazards of democratic politics and the even greater hazards of authoritarianism, one has a feeling of apprehension about the future of the many nations now being born...

...For Nixon may very well be shrewder than the President and more politically minded and adept, but I remember how he clawed his way up the political ladder until it became politically wise to be respectable...

...The logic which prompts this judgment is very rough and faulty, but politically very potent...

...When Garibaldi started his campaign for the unification of Italy, he was warned that the parish priests would oppose him...

...Such a catalogue would be endless and would require the analysis of a political expert...

...On its lowest level, it is a manifestation of "our gang" resisting "your gang.'' This phenomenon might prompt religious people, who regard their religious loyalty as a majestic enterprise, to recognize how easily it may degenerate into bigotry...

...Starting with the premise that the Catholic church is authoritarian, deductive logic draws the inevitable conclusion that Catholic candidates follow the Pope's politics on every issue...

...But empirical evidence runs counter to this conclusion...

...That is the wisdom which makes democracy a guard against injustice...

...and tolerates, a Communist regime...

...But we do know that it played a considerable role in Wisconsin, and that liberal Protestants were anxious for statements discouraging the introduction of the religious issue in the election...

...We deal with our Presidents as the Chinese dealt with their Emperors, holding the "Son of Heaven" responsible even for natural catastrophes occurring during their regimes...

...The irrationalities of politics are so obvious and so numerous that one suspects that "healthy" democracies, such as our own and that of the British, represent either the triumph of a residual wisdom over the obvious absurdities of politics or are the fruit of the power of a great tradition which will survive despite the foolishness of men...

...He is not my choice for the Democratic Presidential nomination but I suspect he will lean over backward to prove that he is not under clerical control...

...I do not know Kennedy at all...

...The late "Big Bill" Thompson, Mayor of Chicago, built his machine on attracting the votes of these ethnic groupings...

...The evidence is clear, not only in our own country but in Western Europe...

...If a highly literate nation can be so irrational, what shall we hope for in the future from the new nations, with very low literacy rates...

...Even ignorant and interested men have enough sense to know when the shoe pinches, though they may not have the skill to manufacture a shoe...

...But one obvious irrationality remains to be mentioned in even a cursory survey...

...When Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts assures us that he supports the First Amendment, I see no reason to doubt him...

...Both pressures are a hazard to a wise foreign policy...

...A more optimistic conclusion about the fate of democracy among the hazards of irrationality of even very literate men is that the various irrationalities cancel each other out and leave room for a residual wisdom...

...The only consolation in dealing with the irrationalities of democratic politics is the fact that authoritarian politics are more foolish and dangerous...

...I hope that the distaste for his kind of political shrewdness will seep from the Washington political observers to the general populace...

...He was rewarded for his empiricism by finding many parish priests on his side...

...This not a complete catalogue of the irrationalities and irrelevancies which influence the electorate...

...The intrusion of the religious issue is, of course, only one of many forms of irrelevance which prompt political judgments and decisions...

...Unfortunately, it does not avail to guarantee the wisdom of democratic states in foreign policy...

...The late Chancellor Heinrich Bruning of the Weimar Republic adopted this policy to prove the reality of "lay Catholicism...

...I did not sign these statements because I thought it was futile to try to eliminate bigotry from the democratic process by high-minded moral suasion...

...The church is not as monolithic as it is supposed to be and, in any case, the ethos of a nation does much to erode the church's authority, even when it attempts to sway political opinion...

...and they suggest that we are at a disadvantage in a contest with a nation under the rule of an elite...

...The worship of the hero is another irrelevance...

...When I think of his probable Republican successor, Vice President Richard Nixon, I hope it will not be regarded as irrelevant...

...Incidentally, I wish the Vatican had more authority over the American hierarchy than it seems to have...

...Both parties are anathema to American "liberal opinion...

...In Poland, a Catholic Cardinal is tolerated by...

...but I know a very devout Catholic, the junior Democratic Senator from Minnesota, Eugene McCarthy, whom I would trust as much as I would Kennedy...

...In that realm the wisdom of the common man may merely suffice to insist on avoiding the perils of war and insuring high living standards...

...Since so much anti-Catholicism stems from Protestant sources, I am rather relieved that the most vocal anti-Catholic describes himself as a "humanist...

...Garibaldi answered that he would not draw such a conclusion without specific facts to support it...

...Western continental democracy has been preserved and expressed in Germany, Belgium and Holland by two parties, the Socialist and the Catholic parties, sometimes in rivalry and sometimes in cooperation...

...On the highest level, it is an example of deductive rather than inductive reasoning...

...This is a curious partnership in which two forms of internationalism have a common ground, a common devotion to the nation: First Secretary Wladyslaw Gomulka is a national Communist who barely escaped death at Stalin's hand: and the church over which Cardinal Wyszynski presides has long been a spiritual arm of Polish nationalism...

...Since the American Presidency not only has great power but a symbolic function as well, the President being a kind of elected "monarch," one wonders whether this latter gift should be regarded as irrelevant...

...Eisenhower is the latest of a long-line of war heroes elevated to the Presidency...

...Among them, only Andrew Jackson was a political force in his own right...

...In this ethnically pluralistic nation we all know about the "balanced ticket," containing at least a Jew, a Catholic and a Protestant, and more recently in the North, a Negro...

...for its attitude toward the dilemmas of coexistence seems more enlightened than that of our American bishops...

...An inflated prosperity, which soon burst into the Great Depression, was certainly more responsible for Herbert Hoover's victory than was Al Smith's Catholicism, or even the prohibition issue, or the fact that Smith—with his "Brown Derby"—was the obvious symbol of an urban democracy to which an agrarian democracy was not yet reconciled...