Michael Sean Winters on politics and Catholicism in private and public life:
Pope Benedict XVI, in his address to the Catholic bishops of the United States last spring, articulated a challenge to contemporary liberalism, saying, “Any tendency to treat religion as a private matter must be resisted…. To the extent that religion becomes a purely private affair, it loses its very soul.” The pope was not advocating a union of church and state. He was, instead, insisting that religion makes claims upon a believer’s entire life—public views as well as private feelings—and that arguments to the contrary are evidence of a kind of intellectual sloth or a superficial faith.
The idea that religion is strictly a private matter entered popular political thought in 1960. John F. Kennedy needed to put to rest some voters’ doubts about his Catholicism, so he gave a major address to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association. “I believe in a President whose religious views are his own private affair, neither imposed by him upon the nation or imposed by the nation upon him as a condition to holding that office,” Kennedy proclaimed. His Houston speech had a specific and immediate goal: Kennedy wanted to assure Protestants that his Catholicism was nothing they needed to worry about, because it did not appear to worry him.
Read his full piece here.