Read: What They Wished For

By Lawrence J. McAndrews (University of Georgia, 2014)

The election of John F. Kennedy in 1960 has long been described as the apogee of Catholic political life in the history of the United States. Largely eschewing his Irish Catholic identity, Kennedy convinced the electorate that he was an American who happened to be Catholic and not merely a pawn of the Roman pontiff.

Kennedy and his successors have had to deal, for better or worse, with a Catholic electorate increasingly assertive in its demands. Both clergy as well as lay Catholics have had a profound impact on presidential politics. In What They Wished For: American Catholics and American Presidents (1960–2004), Lawrence J. McAndrews traces both the crucial impact of the Catholic hierarchy on presidential decision-making, and also the more subtle but still discernible influence of presidential politics on the development of the American church. Each chapter on an individual presidency is broken down into three major issues: war and peace, social justice, and life and death.

We meet within these pages an array of secular and religious figures. We see the American episcopate, laity, and occasionally even the pope fight battles across the American political stage—losing many, such as on abortion or a speedy end to the Vietnam War, but winning their fair share as well, as with the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

In a time when many of the American hierarchy’s attempts to affect policy in this country seem at best feeble and at worst reprehensible, it becomes important for Catholics to remind themselves of their church’s profound impact on the development of American policies, and especially on the commander in chief himself. McAndrews’ book does just that. Its weight signals its rich scholarship. While his writing perhaps suffers from a facile use of liberal/conservative labels (including a use of the latter to describe this magazine), his treatment of his subject is both consistent and compassionate.

This article appeared in the September 2014 issue of U.S. Catholic (Vol. 79, No. 9, page 43).