Santorum set to “challenge” JFK’s speech on faith in public life

Santorum’s speech is scheduled to take place at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, the same city where Kennedy gave his address to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association nearly 50 years ago. Kennedy used the occasion to address fears that as the first Catholic president, he’d feel a duty to take orders from the Pope.

“I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish,” Kennedy said then, “where no public official either requests or accept instructions on public policy from the Pope, the National Council of Churches or any other ecclesiastical source; where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials, and where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act against all.”