2
Before you drift to sleep upon your cot, think back on all the tales that you remember.
…That once there was a fleeting wisp. … Don't let it be forgot that once there was a spot for
one brief shining moment that was known as Camelot. – 1960 Broadway musical Camelot.
1
Despite the volume of ink and sound bite noise generated in discussions of the
“Catholic vote” during the 2004 presidential campaign there is but one simple empirical
lesson that the results of this election reinforced: on the long scale of modern U.S.
electoral history the Catholic vote, much like the legend of Camelot, was a “fleeting
wisp.” It ceased to be a cohesive bloc more than 40 years ago and as a group, Catholic
voters have not always been the consistent “swing vote” group that they are often
portrayed to be (Dionne 2000, Shields 2002). In 2004, yet another Massachusetts
Catholic Democrat Senator with a distinguished military service record and the initials
JFK on the ballot could not revive the increasingly distant memory of a Catholic vote
back to reality at the ballot box.
Perhaps John F. Kennedy’s time in office has too often been described in nearly
mythical proportions to the Aurthurian tale of Camelot, yet the election of the John F.
Kennedy was truly an extraordinary and liberating event that created a larger than life
Catholic icon (Dolan 1993: 422). As Crews notes, “an invisible barrier had been
shattered. Across the nation, Catholics sensed that they had finally achieved unquestioned
first-class status as loyal citizens” (1993: 139). After enduring more than 170 years of
political anti-Catholicism in various forms and degrees
2
, eight in ten Catholic voters
1
Lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner and music composed by Frederick Loewe (1960).
2
In the Anglo tradition, dating to Blackstone’s common law treatises, “If once they could be
brought to renounce the supremacy of the pope, they might quietly enjoy their seven sacraments,
their purgatory, and auricular confession; their worship of reliques and images; nay even their
transubstantiation. But while they acknowledge a foreign power, superior to the sovereignty of
the kingdom, they cannot complain if the laws of that kingdom will not treat them upon the
footing of good subjects” (1769: Vol. IV, p. 54). This basic argument was exported to the U.S.
Convention