Rome, Italy, Apr 12, 2010 / 08:11 am
Reflecting upon Archbishop Charles Chaput’s speech about John F. Kennedy and U.S. church-state relations, an Italian academic has questioned whether Kennedy’s Houston speech in fact advanced secularism. Warning against subordinating religion to politics, he suggested the archbishop himself assumes too strong a connection between church-state separation and political institutions being indifferent to religion.
In a March 1 lecture at Houston Baptist University, the Archbishop of Denver criticized President John F. Kennedy's historic 1960 Houston campaign speech about his Catholic faith’s impact upon his political decisions.
Calling the speech “sincere, compelling, articulate – and wrong,” Archbishop Chaput said Kennedy’s view divided private beliefs from public duties, set the national interest over and against religion, and began “the project of walling religion away from the process of governance in a new and aggressive way.”
The archbishop’s criticisms were themselves critiqued by Luca Diotallevi, a sociology professor at the University of Roma Tre and a former senior fellow at the Harvard Divinity School. Diotallevi, a specialist in political science who is trusted by the Italian bishops’ conference, published his critique of Archbishop Chaput on Chiesa, the site of Vatican expert Sandro Magister.