Manhattan church led by Norman Vincent Peale was known for opposing presidency of JFK – and Catholics in general
Donald Trump’s attacks this week on Pope Leo, for his criticism of the US attack on Iran and the US president’s decision to post an image of himself as Jesus Christ on social media, make a good deal more sense considering Trump attended services as a young man at the Protestant Marble Collegiate church in Manhattan, which was led at the time by an anti-Catholic pastor.
That church’s pastor in Trump’s youth, Norman Vincent Peale, who would later officiate at Trump’s first wedding, is best-known today as the author of the Christian self-help book The Power of Positive Thinking, but when Trump was 14, Peale made national headlines as the leader of a group of Protestant churchmen who loudly objected to the presidential candidacy of John F Kennedy, on the grounds that he was a Catholic.
As Time magazine reported in September 1960, Peale, “a longstanding Republican whose Protestant following rivals Billy Graham’s as the largest in the US”, was one of the most prominent leaders of a group of “150 Protestant clergymen and laymen, calling themselves the Citizens for Religious Freedom”, who met that month in Washington’s Mayflower Hotel to agree on a statement objecting to the notion that a Catholic could be president.
