COAU

"With Mr. Kennedy in the White House, things are bound to be different for American Catholics." So says the Jesuit weekly America, in an editorial saluting John F. Kennedy, by whose election "the full first-class citizenship of U.S. Catholics was at long last ratified." Continues the editorial:

"How do these now fully enfranchised Catholics regard their coreligionist in the White House? There is no gloating in the Catholic attitude. Catholics look for no special preferments or special favors, and they will get none.

"We shall all have fresh confidence, new courage, fewer resentments, and an easier feeling about shouldering our share of the common day-to-day work of America. Look for this in hundreds of ways--and we sincerely hope that you will not look in vain.

"With it now clearly established that our country does not accord prior rights to Anglo-Saxon Protestants, you can expect to find Catholics turning up in all sorts of places where, formerly, nursing real or partially imagined resentments, they never quite felt at home: on all the citizens' committees that heretofore they frequently seemed to shun--committees to clear slums, organize municipal orchestras, build new wings on public libraries, raise money for the Red Cross, and all the rest. We shall be surprised if, from now on, Catholics don't take a more active and constructive interest in the public schools--to which they choose not to send their children.

"In a word, it isn't hard to think that with a Catholic President in Washington, we Catholics might even call a halt to our old game of mutually excommunicating each other as 'liberals' or 'conservatives,' and form a new citizens' front called COAU--Catholics and Other Americans United. It's time we did."

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