Trump’s Antipathy For Pope May Have Roots In Childhood Protestant Church

The Guardian 📰 Written by Robert Mackey. Recommended by Jim Monaghan.

Manhattan church led by Norman Vincent Peale was known for opposing presidency of JFK – and Catholics in general

Somewhat overlooked in the furore over 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 portraying himself as Jesus Christ on social media, is the fact that 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” . . .

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