The image of the pre-conciliar Catholic Church in the United States as catechetically effective and politically potent can be hard to square with the long-term damage done to Catholicism’s role in American public life by that very pre-Vatican II Catholic, John F. Kennedy.
Some biographers suggest that JFK became more religiously serious after his infant son Patrick’s death in 1963. I certainly hope that was the case. For most of his life, however, Catholicism for John Fitzgerald Kennedy seems to have been less a matter of deep personal conversion than an ethnic marker—sometimes useful, sometimes troublesome, but always irradicable. Kennedy regularly performed what were then known as his “religious duties.” But their impact on his manner of life appears to have been minimal, and he had no grasp of Catholic political theory.
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