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On a famous day in Houston 45 years ago, presidential candidate John F. Kennedy, a Catholic, had to assure a skeptical audience of evangelical clergy that his presidency would not be controlled by the Vatican.

On Friday, a U.S. president who is a favorite of evangelicals and two former presidents—one a Southern Baptist—attended a pope's funeral, signaling an enormous shift in the American religious landscape over the past two generations.

In part, scholars say, President Bush, his father and former President Bill Clinton attended Friday's funeral recognizing that Pope John Paul II's record as an advocate for human rights transcends politics. But President Bush's personal admiration for John Paul also illuminates the fact that over the past 25 years millions of like-minded evangelicals have forged alliances with conservative Catholics on a host of hard-fought cultural issues.

Common opposition to abortion, same-sex marriage, research on embryos, and doctor-assisted suicide combined with John Paul's robust anti-Communism to reduce, although not eliminate, historic animosities between the two groups, scholars said.

This time last year, a poll by Religion and Ethics Newsweekly and U.S. News & World Report found that rank-and-file evangelicals held John Paul in higher regard than Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson.

The two groups' shared values were once again vividly on display last month as evangelical and Catholic organizations provided much of the public advocacy on behalf of Terri Schiavo, the brain-damaged Florida woman whose feeding tube was removed after a long court fight.

While Florida's Catholic bishops supported Schiavo's parents and a Franciscan friar acted as the family spokesman, Bush flew from Texas to Washington specifically to sign a customized bill to send the Schiavo case into federal courts for review.

"In the whole trajectory of the last 20 years, Catholics and evangelicals have found themselves as foxhole-mates on a lot of key values," said Larry Eskridge of the Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals at Wheaton College.

The overlap is not perfect. Not all Catholics are conservative on the social issues that matter to evangelicals. Indeed, Al Gore carried Catholics in the 2000 presidential election, although Bush won them in 2004.

But overall, "evangelicals feel more kinship with conservative Catholics than with some of their brothers and sisters in parts of mainline Protestantism, that's for sure," said Richard Cizik of the National Association of Evangelicals.

To be sure, evangelicals' relatively new regard for the Vatican—or at least their regard for John Paul II—does not completely explain the extraordinary weight of the United States' delegation to his funeral. Clinton, for instance, a Southern Baptist who attended a Methodist church as president, does not line up with the Vatican or most evangelicals on abortion. In addition, Friday's was the first papal funeral since President Ronald Reagan opened diplomatic relations with the Vatican in 1984—making this delegation the first to honor the pope as a head of state.

Even so, the presence of Bush, first lady Laura Bush, two former presidents and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice far outweighed the United States' delegation to the last papal funeral.

In 1978, the American delegation to the funeral of Pope John Paul I was led by President Jimmy Carter's mother, Lillian. A month earlier, the White House sent first lady Rosalynn Carter to the funeral of Pope Paul VI.

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April (Web-only) 2005, Vol. 49