Why were people concerned about Kennedy being Catholic?
1 Answer
America's Protestant majority was concerned about having a president who took orders from the Pope.
Explanation:
Catholics and Protestants differ on some significant issues, and Papal authority is a big one. Catholics form the largest single Christian denomination in America, but are outnumbered by members of the various Protestant denominations. Religious freedom--the freedom to follow or not follow any particular religion-- is a prettty major selling point of the US Constitution.
Kennedy, a Catholic and the son of a very prominent Catholic businessman and ambassador, embraced some popular and mainstream platforms and credibly assured the nation that he wasn't a sleeper agent for the Vatican. His opponent in the 1960 election, Richard Nixon, was a Quaker, which is slightly outside the mainstream of American religious practices, and ultimately most voters just didn't make a huge distinction between them on the specific issue of religion.
Anti-Catholic sentiment has long been a feature of the American landscape, especially in the mid-19th Century when an influx of Catholic immigrants from Ireland and Germany appeared to pose a threat to the Protestants' majority standing. This spawned an anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant political movement, the Know-Nothings .
