Can a Roman Catholic be president of the United States? Silly question, right? Sixty-five years have passed since John F. Kennedy went from Mass at Holy Trinity in Georgetown to take his inauguration oath on the Fitzgerald family Bible; and, while there are plenty of grounds on which to criticize that priapic shyster, his faith isn’t one of them.

Go back to the early days of the republic, though, and you find a very different attitude. John Jay, one of the Founding Fathers, who went on to become the first U.S. chief justice, argued that his home state of New York should extend full toleration to every sect “except the professors of the religion of the Church of Rome, who ought not to hold lands in, or be admitted to a participation of the civil rights enjoyed by the members of this state.”