Social media carried a photo of Pope Leo XIV in the papal office with Vice President J.D. Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Do we realize how revolutionary that picture is? It’s not just that the Pope is American. It’s that the Vice President is a Catholic, as is the Secretary of State.

Sixty-five years ago, that picture would have been responsible for a rush of stroke cases in Bible Belt ERs. The Jack Chick of the era would certainly have depicted Pope John XXIII packing up and waiting to move to the United States the moment Jack Kennedy profaned the White House. And Protestant ministers in Houston would have pondered the “threats to democracy” (some things never go away) of a Papist in the Presidency — at least until JFK went to Texas to assure them a little thing like his faith would never get in the way of his politics, a vision of the role of a Catholic in American politics the second “Catholic” head-of-state would espouse his entire career and put on steroids.

Well, 65 years later, some things have changed.

The Catholic Vice President in the photo doesn’t apologize for being Catholic or letting his faith animate his politics. Indeed, he often invokes it to explain his positions.

The Pope doesn’t seem especially homesick, pining to start an American Papacy in lieu of an Avignon one. And he’d probably be more comfortable in the Midwest than in the Beltway.

The Protestant ministers in Houston might ask themselves what they got wrong. Because JFK’s applauded toggling between “Catholic as Catholic” and “Catholic as politician” paved the way for the evisceration of moral standards in American public life built upon and nourished by the Judeo-Christian tradition in favor of a militant secularism intent on exorcising religion from the now “naked public square” (to borrow R.J. Neuhaus’s term). I’ve previously argued they got their come-uppance from their fellow Protestant, Jimmy Carter, whose voice was the voice of Esau but whose policies were the policies of Jacob, who disappointed their hope to reverse America’s moral trajectory. When they saw fellow ministers advocating for abortion, sodomy, and gender ideology, they realized what Kennedy’s concession had wrought. I’d even bet that today some of those Houston ministers might even ask to pull up a chair with those tres amigos.

I’m not trying to say “I told you so” or even to extol Catholicism. I want to say that what was sold to Americans and Catholics in 1960 as an ideal solution to U.S. Church-state relations and how Catholics could fit into them was in fact deeply flawed. It was a concession to a religiously bigoted Protestant “Mainline” that, as Neuhaus pointed out, would become the “Old Line” within two decades. It hurt both Catholics and believing Protestants deeply. Catholics suffered through a bipolar redefinition of “Catholicism” to mean not moral influence on public life but the sociological presence of an officeholder splashed on the head as an infant. There’s a line from JFK to “personally opposed” Mario Cuomo et al. Protestants suffered by the advance of a secularization that quickly dispelled the cultural gases they were counting on to perpetuate their ideal of an America guided by “that old time religion.” The dissipation of that ethos also divided Protestantism, with many denominations (e.g., Episcopalians, Methodists) themselves splitting over accommodations to secularism.

While it certainly is not part of the GOP’s explicit platform, what I do hope is that we gain a different paradigm for how we think faith-conscious Catholic officeholders should act in America. An alternative to the “Kennedy consensus” would be a lasting contribution to America. Who knows? It might even provide the basis for rebuilding an effective Catholic presence in the Democrat Party. Rather than excommunicating pro-life Catholics from politics, we might recover awareness of the incoherence of pro-abortion Democrats in the Communion line.

Yes, Church and state are distinct, but are they really totally “separate?” There’s nothing of Caesar’s that was not first and remains God’s. Even conceding what Vatican II calls “the autonomy of created things” does not mean Caesar’s arms are not too short to box with God — much less imagine himself a contender, by victory or default, for the title of divinity.