The Election-Two Articles The Religious Issue

...The sense of the collective problems of human togetherness is expressed in "natural law" theories, which make justice the norm of social relations...

...Germany both before and after Hitler, under the late Chancellor Heinrich Bruning and the present Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, entrusted the leadership of the democratic forces to a Catholic without any fears of becoming a dupe to the Pope...

...My suspicion is that Francis Cardinal Spellman and Dr...

...Either they had a tremendous interest in the American election or they were prompted by an American friend in the hierarchy to take their action...

...The Governor, despite his impressive record, was anathema to the church because he believed in birth control...

...Nor will it seem strange that Kennedy beguiled the Democratic urban masses back to the fold, and not altogether by a common religious loyalty...

...They could not possibly have hoped to influence the Puerto Rican election...

...I do not criticize them for this abstention...

...When all these facts are considered, the past campaign with a Catholic candidate on the Democratic ticket will seem right and proper...

...On the Catholic side, many faithful voted against Kennedy because he was not a "good Catholic," which probably meant that he did not believe in tax support for parochial schools...

...But the fact is that such a thing as "lay Catholicism" is a creative and slightly heretical political force in the whole Western democratic culture...

...Two, including the Archbishop, were Americans from the New York Diocese...

...Only one was Spanish...

...Because of this difference between lay and clerical opinion—not on social issues, where the one informs the other, but on church-state issues—I doubt whether many priests voted for Kennedy, though I have no evidence for this conviction, except in regard to one Catholic seminary where only the Jewish cook voted the Democratic ticket...

...The political alliance between Jews and Catholics in our urban centers springs from this common social experience...

...Of course there were more obvious religious reasons for the vote on both sides...

...For me the historic symbol of this alliance, at least in New York Democratic politics, was the fact that the distinguished Jewish social worker, Belle Moskowitz, was one of Al Smith's chief lieutenants and was frequently referred to by him as his "conscience...

...The Baptists have a sense of historic mission about the separation of church and state which no reassurance by John Kennedy could allay...

...The question was always whether New York, Philadelphia, Detroit, St...

...Perhaps that gives point to a nefarious campaign saying in New York to the effect that the Democratic party of New York was an alliance between the intellectuals and the Puerto Ricans...

...The Catholic church has not been able, unaided, to extricate itself from a traditional order...

...In these problems the question is how much justice can be achieved by carefully arbitrating conflicting rights and interests, and not whether we can persuade one group to sacrifice itself to the other...

...That was proved by the election returns in Puerto Rico: In a commonwealth 96 per cent Catholic, the Governor was elected by an overwhelming majority...

...Even the most religious Jews understand instinctively that they were emancipated into a liberal society not by a religious movement but by secular enlightenment...

...Canada, with a much more serious problem than ours because the Catholic minority is localized in Quebec and is identical with a French-speaking ethnic minority, usually has had Catholic Prime Ministers of its Liberal party...

...The affinity between Catholicism and the urban masses was laid in a basic philosophy but was accentuated in America since the immigrants who manned modern industry were mostly Catholics or, in the needle trades, Jews...

...But since, in theory, the hierarchy alone has the power to define the issues, even the most liberal candidate must try to emphasize what is common and not what is different between the two...

...An incident at the close of the campaign may betray this clerical animus...

...On the other hand, prominent Lutheran theologians used "Reformation Day...

...But more subtly both the farmers and the businessmen are interested in a measure of social security against the mounting hazards of the great industrial machine...

...We are afraid of Catholicism because we do not understand the effect of historical forces upon a seemingly monolithic church...

...In theory only the Pope defines the ultimate standards for the whole church...

...One observation, interesting with reference not to a particular campaign but to American history, concerns the degree of anti-Catholic bias in our nation, unmatched in any other nation, and reaching the level of paranoia...

...A non-Catholic supporter of a Catholic candidate can say afterward what one does not say in the campaign : that there is a great difference between lay and clerical attitudes, not on social issues but on issues of church and state...

...I know of no candidate who has said what is a fact: that Catholic laymen, both here and in other countries, are not devoted to, or in agreement with, even the most hallowed traditions which give the priest the authority to define moral issues, particularly on the question of church and state...

...But the point of the story is in the ethnic and national origins of the hierarchs...

...Protestantism, on the other hand, has an individualistic ethic, in which "love" is the ostensible ultimate norm, though sacrificial love is irrelevant to the problems of group relations, whether of trade unions and management, races or nations...

...The reason for this superiority lies in the Catholic appreciation of the social substance of human existence compared with the frequently excessive individualism of Protestantism...

...a traditional Lutheran religious observance, to warn against anti-Catholic prejudice in politics, while the sects, who probably had never heard of Reformation Day, used it for political purposes...

...The Protestant fear of a Catholic candidate was fortunately not predominant in the established Protestant denominations and was confined to the Baptists, the fundamentalists and the fringe sects who abound in the "Bible belt...

...Rhineland Catholicism and the Liberal party of Quebec are shining examples...

...The hierarchy of the Puerto Rican Catholic church advised the faithful to vote against the popular Governor Munoz Marin and in fact threatened them with discipline if they did not...

...Louis and Los Angeles would pile up enough votes to overcome the margins of Republican and Protestant farmers amassed either "up-state" or "down-state...

...This compound reigned in America until the turn of the century, until various forms of the so called "social gospel" rescued Protestantism from the embrace of economic conservatism...

...Homesteads for the farmers and land grants for the railroads were the vivid symbols of this Republican alliance...

...As a religious minority the Jews fear a tight dogmatic religious system...

...There were, of course, the Republican suburbs, the continuing reminder of the agrarian-business alliance in the Republican party...

...How else could they deal with the hazard of misunderstanding the relation of a universal church to a particular culture and nation...

...The campaign returns reminded one of the old, and perhaps the perennial, pattern of American politics...

...It is not qualified as a political alliance by the fact that Jews have more religious affinities with Protestants than with Catholics...

...A further reminder that this voting pattern was not primarily religiously but economically or socially motivated is the fact that wealthy Catholic businessmen, like those who attended the Al Smith dinner during the last campaign, leaned to the Republican party and gave their cheers to Richard Nixon...

...Daniel A. Poling voted for the same Presidential candidate for different reasons...

...But even the new impetus in Protestantism did not prevent a continued affinity between the Protestant faith and the individualistic farmers and businessmen, who have been in perpetual political alliance in the Republican party since post-Civil War days...

...Democrats feared that this was just the kind of incident which would scare the American voters and were inclined to dismiss the incident as coming out of a Spanish-Catholic situation, hoping that the American public would not be fooled...

...That is why our anti-Catholics always choose Spain as their horrible example...

...the most liberal Catholic clergy, as distinguished from Catholic laymen, will not accept this degree of separation...

...At that, the incident may have been responsible for a belated swing to Nixon recorded by all the pollsters...

...But Catholicism, once extricated from a traditional ethos, relates itself to the realities of an industrial civilization rather better than Protestantism...

...The Election-Two Articles The Religious Issue By Reinhold Niebuhr IT IS RATHER late, and possibly repetitious, to comment on the religious issue in the recent American Presidential campaign, but some observations had best be made when they are not subject to the suspicion of partisan bias...

...The actual Protestant norm is of course self-reliance and individual initiative, which furnished the bridge between the individualism of classical economics and old-fashioned Republicanism and Protestantism...

...But the Jews are politically very sophisticated, and this latter fact has not prevented their political alliance with Catholic liberals...