Last March, Cardinal Timothy Dolan wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal headlined “The Democrats Abandon Catholics”. The Archbishop of New York wrote: “It saddens me, and weakens the democracy millions of Americans cherish, when the party that once embraced Catholics now slams the door on us.”

Dolan was speaking particularly about abortion. Indeed, it’s surprising that the Democrats – the party of John F Kennedy – have become almost uniformly pro-choice. When the pro-life movement began in the United States, it was largely dismissed as a fringe position composed almost solely of Romanists. Then, in the decades following Roe v Wade, evangelicals in the Republican Party took up the pro-life banner and won about half of those papist votes for the GOP.