Trump’s antipathy for Pope may have roots in childhood Protestant church | Donald Trump
Donald Trump’s attacks this week on Pope Leo, his criticism of the US attack on Iran, and the US president’s decision to post the image of Jesus Christ on social media make much more sense considering that Trump attended services as a young man at the Protestant Marble Collegiate church in Manhattan, which was then run by an anti-Catholic priest.
Norman Vincent Peale, who was the pastor of that church during Trump’s youth and would later officiate at Trump’s first wedding, is best known today as the author of the Christian self-help book The Power of Positive Thinking, but when Trump was 14, Peale made national headlines as the leader of a group of Protestant churchmen who vociferously opposed John F. Kennedy’s presidential candidacy on the grounds that he was a Catholic.
Like Time magazine reported In September 1960, Peale, “a long-time Republican and rival of Billy Graham, the biggest Protestant follower in the United States,” was one of the most prominent leaders of a group of “150 Protestant clergy and laymen calling themselves Citizens for Religious Freedom” who met that month at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington to agree on a statement opposing the idea that a Catholic could be president.
Peale chaired the meeting, two reporters from the Washington Post and Long Island’s Newsday said. “Our American culture is in danger,” Peale warned his colleagues. “I’m not saying it won’t survive, but it won’t be the same.”
“By the end of the hearings, they released a 2,000-word manifesto that, more than any other declaration made in the campaign so far, served to make religion the most emotional issue of the 1960 election,” Time reported.
That expression, Printed in the New York TimesAlong with Peale’s photo dated September 8, 1960, it serves as a reminder of how recently violent anti-Catholic sentiment was acceptable to the country’s Protestant establishment.
What is most interesting from today’s perspective is that the anti-Kennedy manifesto Peale and other Protestant clergy issued in 1960 focused primarily on the claim that a Catholic would refuse to support the separation of church and state.
Peale’s group wrote: “In a pluralistic society like ours, fraternity depends on a solid wall of separation between church and state. We think that the American hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church can only increase religious tensions and politico-religious problems by trying to tear down this wall.” “Much depends on the strong support of Americans of all faiths for this well-tested wall of separation.”
Kennedy responded to the objections of the Protestant clergy with the following words: A conversation about religion and politics The following week to a group of Baptist ministers in Houston, Texas.
In his speech, Kennedy said: “I believe in an America in which the separation of church and state is absolute; in which no Catholic bishop can tell the President – if he is a Catholic – how to act, and no Protestant minister can tell his parishioners who to vote for; in which no church or parochial school is given any public funds or political preferences; and in which no person is denied public office simply because his religion differs from the President who can appoint him or the people who can elect him.”
The underlying concern expressed in the statement from Peale’s group was the same concern spread by . Anti-Catholic conspiracy theorists In 1928, when Al Smith was the first Catholic presidential candidate: The idea that the Pope would secretly control a Catholic president.
As a historian Robert Slayton explainedIn 1928: “The Ku Klux Klan was actively involved in preventing a Catholic from approaching the White House and did all it could to defeat Smith. A Klan leader sent out thousands of postcards after the Democrats nominated the New Yorker and stated unequivocally: ‘We are now faced with the darkest hour in American history. In a convention governed by Political Romanism, the anti-Christ has won.'”
A year before that election, Donald Trump’s father, Fred Trump, arrested 1,000 robed members of the Ku Klux Klan at the Memorial Day parade in Queens rebel after a police force led by Irish Americans tried to stop them from marching. The focus of the Klan’s anger in New York at the time was anger at the Irish Catholic police department.
A Klan pamphlet circulated in Jamaica, Queens, following the riot and included in contemporary reports included the headline: “Americans Attacked by New York City Roman Catholic Police!” The pamphlet text began: “Native-born Protestant Americans are caned and beaten while exercising their rights in the country of their birth.”
