It seems so long ago that in the 1960 presidential election a Catholic candidate was fighting for his political life.  John F. Kennedy won by a whisker, fending off religious bigots.  Probably 75 percent of the country has been born since then and Catholicism no longer matters, for the most part, to a vast majority of voters.  It means more to people today that Mitt Romney is a Mormon, yet it says as much that a Catholic, Rick Santorum, might be the choice of evangelical Christians when the conservative wing of the Republican Party makes its stand in the South against Romney – whose forebears were the ones who feared Kennedy the most.

The fact that the South might block Romney’s push for the nomination says more about the Catholic Church than it does about the Republican presidential circus.  That a Catholic candidate like Santorum (whose name in Latin means “of the saints”) is so right-wing in his philosophy tells us how the Church has changed – and how it intends to grow its role in national political affairs.  Continue reading →