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{15} Chapter One Catholics and John Kennedy (1961–1963) All eyes were on the nation’s first Catholic president as he took the oath of office in January 1961. Those non-Catholics who feared that John Kennedy would be a captive of his church awaited his first theocratic tendencies. Those Catholics who worried that he would capitulate to the skeptics anticipated his first secular signals. Both would be disappointed. Kennedy would seldom speak of his faith. But he would often practice it. Kennedy’s turns from confrontation to negotiation with the Soviet Union and from political caution to personal courage on civil rights were in large part responses to pressure from his church. And his change from aversion to adherence to federal funding of artificial contraception was in large part a rebuke to pressure from his church. War and Peace: Nuclear War John F. Kennedy’s presidency began famously with his stirring inaugural address , in which he pledged to “pay any price” to prevent the spread of Soviet communism around the globe. By promising to outdo his predecessor, Republican Dwight Eisenhower, in his commitment to Cold War containment , the Catholic entering the White House was professing the ardent anticommunism not only of his party, but of his church.1 Yet within two and a half years, Kennedy told an American University audience in June 1963 that the United States must peacefully coexist with the Soviet Union in a world made “safe for diversity.” Once again, the president was speaking not only for his party, but for his church.2 Two months later, the United States, the Soviet Union, and Great Britain signed the Limited Test Ban Treaty, which ushered in an era of détente between the superpowers by outlawing nuclear-weapons testing in the atmosphere , underwater, and in outer space. In their apparent metamorphoses from hawks to doves on the issue of nuclear war, the U.S. government and the Roman Catholic Church traveled parallel paths from 1961 to 1963. In their {16} chapter one dramatic coalescence behind the slowing of the arms race, however, neither the president nor his church forgot whence they came. Hawks of a Feather Kennedy’s inaugural address earned rave reviews in many quarters, including American Catholic ones. As if agreeing with Kennedy, Pope John XXIII in his 1961 Easter message interrupted an otherwise apolitical statement to convey his “anxiety and deep distress” over “the terrifying actions of a great number of men” who threaten “those who love justice, liberty, and a life that is laborious, honored, beneficent, and tranquil”—a thinly veiled assault on the Soviet bloc.3 Emboldened by the American failure in Cuba at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961 and his perceived mastery over Kennedy in their first summit meeting in Vienna in June, Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev warned the United States to remove its troops from West Berlin. Kennedy responded forcefully, vowing never to abandon the western zone until the entire city was free, and calling up twenty-five thousand reserves to prepare for the Cold War’s worst-case scenario. “We are now engaged in a struggle for survival against the greatest enemy that ever threatened world civilization,” said Boston’s Richard Cardinal Cushing, Kennedy’s closest friend in the U.S. hierarchy.4 Pope John XXIII also weighed in on the side of the Americans, and against naïve diplomacy. Repeating his earlier repudiation of “godless” communism, the pontiff in his July 1961 encyclical, Mater et Magistra (“Mother and Teacher”), admonished that East-West summitry could not bridge “different or radically opposed concepts of life” without the reciprocal trust conspicuously absent in the Berlin crisis.5 Khrushchev indeed relented over Berlin, but not before he had authorized the construction of the wall that would divide the city and define the Cold War for almost three decades more. Though chastened over Berlin, Khrushchev renewed the nuclear arms race, ordering eighteen atomic tests in five weeks in the fall of 1961, as the Soviets and the Americans entered the sixteenth consecutive month without disarmament negotiations. Kennedy condemned the blasts, vowing to build fallout shelters “for every American as rapidly as possible.” On November 4, Pope John marked his eightieth birthday and the third anniversary of his coronation by denouncing the Soviet tests, and his Christmas message lamented that “mutual distrust is making conditions progressively worse” in the Cold War.6 At the annual “Red Mass” at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City in October, the homily...

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