There, headlining everywhere in the media, is the story.
Here’s a sample headline, this one from NPR: “Rubio visits Vatican amid escalating tensions between Trump and Pope Leo.”
The story opens this way:
MILAN, Italy (RNS) — Amid a growing public rift between Pope Leo XIV and President Donald Trump — arguably the two most influential American-born figures in the world — Secretary of State Marco Rubio visited the Vatican on Thursday seeking to highlight common ground between the Holy See and the Trump administration.
Rubio’s meeting with Vatican officials lasted roughly two and a half hours and focused on “the strong relationship between the United States and the Holy See and their shared commitment to promoting peace and human dignity,” according to a statement from the U.S. Embassy to the Holy See.
As noted, there are similar headlines and stories about the meeting of the Pope and the American secretary of state all over the media. The central thrust of all the stories is about the disagreement between the Pope and the American president about American policy in Iran. Which is, in fact, a completely normal, run-of-the-mill policy disagreement, this one between Washington and Rome. (RELATED: Mind Your Manners, Mr. President)
And no one blinks.
For those with no memory of American history, the moment was telling.
Why?
Jump in the History Time Capsule with me and zip back to 1928, a long 98 years ago.
The news of the day in that year’s presidential election was… drumroll please… the Catholic faith of that year’s Democratic Party presidential nominee, New York Governor Al Smith.
Yes, that’s right. Huge controversy swirled about in that year’s presidential campaign between Democrat nominee Al Smith and the GOP candidate, Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover.
That Hoover was a Protestant, specifically a Quaker, was not controversial. Every American president from George Washington to the then-current President Calvin Coolidge had been or was a Protestant.
In fact, Coolidge, a Vermonter, came to fame in my hometown of Northampton, Massachusetts, rising through the Republican ranks from city councilman to, successively, mayor, state representative, state senator, lieutenant governor, governor, vice president to then-President Warren Harding, and, with Harding’s sudden death, president. To this day, the church I was baptized and confirmed in — the Jonathan Edwards Congregational church in Northampton — has the Coolidge family pew carefully preserved at the back of the Edwards Church sanctuary. The Coolidges were decided Protestant Congregationalists.
As noted, the big deal issue in that 1928 presidential campaign was that Governor Smith was a Roman Catholic — the first to be nominated for the presidency.
A decidedly good biography of Smith, by historians Matthew and Hannah Josephson in Al Smith: Hero of the Cities (A Political Portrait Drawing on the Papers of Frances Perkins), Amazon.com says this about the 1928 campaign:
In the spring of 1927 the question of whether it was proper for a Roman Catholic to become President of the United States was raised in a serious way….” the Josephson’s write. They note that a prominent New York lawyer, an Episcopalian, named Charles C. Marshall, penned “An Open Letter to the Honorable Alfred E. Smith” that was published in The Atlantic Monthly magazine.
The story continues:
In the event Smith attained the highest office, Marshall asked, what influence would the authority of the Roman Church have on his judgment of temporal matters? How would his administration of a government three-fourths of whose citizens were Protestants be affected?”
….
From what Smith could make of Marshall’s open letter, it revived more old fears that a loyal Roman Catholic might not be able to reconcile the doctrines of his church with the provisions of the Constitution and the rulings of the Supreme Court regarding civil and religious liberty and separation of church and state.
Smith, the book reports, considered throwing the letter in the trash. Instead, he replied to it. Saying, among other things, that:
I recognize no power … in my Church to interfere with the operations of the Constitution of the United States for the enforcement of the law of the land. I believe in absolute freedom of conscience and equality of all churches, all sects, all beliefs before the law.”
As clear as this was, Smith lost the 1928 election in a landslide. But the issue of the relationship between the Catholic Church and the American government was raised again in a big way 32 years later when Catholic Senator John F. Kennedy emerged as the Democratic nominee in 1960. So pervasive was the issue that JFK felt compelled to address the issue in a speech to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association, a group of Protestant ministers, saying, among other things, this:
For contrary to common newspaper usage, I am not the Catholic candidate for president. I am the Democratic Party’s candidate for president, who happens also to be a Catholic. I do not speak for my church on public matters, and the church does not speak for me.
Why is this history notable today?
Because the headlines of the moment have Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a Catholic, meeting with Pope Leo in the Vatican to discuss policy differences between the Pope and the American president on Iran and the Middle East.
What is remarkable is that the ancient history of anti-Catholicism so evident in 1928 and during the 1960 Kennedy campaign is, effectively, gone with the wind. President Trump is decidedly not an anti-Catholic/religious bigot. In fact, as his own family illustrates, he has a Jewish son-in-law and, in fact, appointed the Catholic Senator Rubio to be his and America’s official representative as secretary of state.
All of which is to say, America has come a very long way in terms of anti-Catholic bigotry. It is nowhere to be seen in the highest echelons of the American government.
And good for that.
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