According to the survey conducted by AP, of the Catholics who voted, 50% supported Trump, while 49% supported Biden.

Ahead of the election, the rival campaigns targeted Catholics with ardent appeals to vote based on their faith.

Trump supporters said faithful Catholics should not vote for Biden because he supported abortion rights. Biden backers said Trump is too divisive and has failed to elevate social justice issues that are part of Catholic teaching.

Michael Wear, a past faith adviser to former President Barack Obama, said he saw signs that the Biden campaign's focused outreach to religious had paid off. Biden would be just the second Catholic president after John F. Kennedy.

Michael New is an abortion opponent who teaches social research at the Catholic University of America. He said Trump's opposition to abortion likely attracted some Catholic voters even if they disagreed with him on other issues.

This year, Catholic voters accounted for 22% of the electorate, and there was a sharp rift within their ranks by race and ethnicity.

Among white Catholics, 57% backed Trump, and 42% backed Biden, according to AP VoteCast. In 2016, Trump won 64% of white Catholics, and Clinton won 31%, according to Pew Research Center voter analysis.

Among Hispanic Catholics, VoteCast shows 67% backed Biden, and 32% backed Trump.

"The election results show that the Catholic Church is as divided as our nation, but the real divide is race and ethnicity, not theology," said David Gibson, director of Fordham University's Center on Religion and Culture.

President Donald Trump won support from nearly 80% white evangelical Christian voters in his race for reelection.

Among voters with no religious affiliation, Biden took 72% while Trump took 26%. Other religious voting blocs going for Biden, in line with their previous preference for Democrats.

Sources

PBS

"We're Catholics before we're Democrats. We're Catholics before we're Republicans. We're even Catholics before we're Americans because we know that God has a demand on us prior to any government demand on us," Chaput was quoted as saying.

"And this has been the story of the martyrs through the centuries," he added.

He said Church teaching against abortion "requires absolute adherence" on the part of Catholic voters, who must "stand united" in opposition to the practice regardless of party affiliation.

"(Abortion) really is a big issue today, and I think what it requires of Catholics is a loyalty to the church prior to their political party," Chaput told Catholic News Service Oct. 20 in Rome.

"If we don't stand united on this issue, we're bound to failure, not only in the area of protecting unborn human life but in maintaining our religious freedom," he said.

Archbishop Chaput echoed the calls of other American bishops to have their flocks consider their faith in the voting booth.

"We do believe in the separation of church and state, but we don't believe in the separation of faith from our political life," he said.

"It's very important for Catholics to make distinctions when voting that they never support intrinsic evils like abortion, which is evil in all circumstances. That's a lot different from different economic policies" that people can reasonably disagree on, the archbishop said in another interview with the Catholic News Agency.

His remarks come as an Oct. 22 Gallup poll shows the "economy in general" is the issue rated most important by Americans as the election nears.

"But people who are practicing Catholics cannot have alternate views on abortion," he said. "Such foundational issues have a huge impact and it's important that Catholics make those distinctions."

Sources

• Catholic News Service
• Catholic News Agency
• The Washington Post
• Image: Catholic Vote

For years, of course, American leadership has been dominated by white Anglo-Saxon protestants. According to the Times' chart, there was not a non-Protestant or non-white Speaker of the House until 1961. The Supreme Court was dominated by white Protestants until 1994, when for the first time five of the nine justices were non-Protestant or non-white. And while there have been candidates from various backgrounds (namely Catholic) for president and vice president for decades, the number of non-whites or non-Protestants who've actually held those two jobs are still very few: Charles Curtis, Herbert Hoover's vice president, was part Native American; John F. Kennedy was Catholic; Vice President Joe Biden is Catholic; and Barack Obama is African American. (Notably, this is the first year since 1964 that there has been a non-white or non-Protestant on the Republican party ticket.)

Some of these numbers, of course, are simply reflective of politics. George W. Bush, for instance, named three Supreme Court justices, all conservative Catholics, to their post. But surely, some of it is also a sign of progress that we as a country are more accepting of other faiths and other ethnicities. For the first time in history, none of the men at the top of either ticket, Democratic or Republican, are both white and Protestant. Read more

Sources

• Washington Post
• Image: MPRNews

The percentage of Catholics who are highly committed to the church has declined -­­ from 27 to 19 percent — in the 25 years since we first began tracking American Catholics' levels of commitment. Nonetheless, there is a relative stability in the commitment patterns over time. In 2005, for example, 21 percent of the respondents were classified as highly committed Catholics, and this figure was 23 percent in both the 1993 and 1999 surveys. Further, the percentage of Catholics with a low level of commitment has not increased over the past 25 years; in fact it has slightly declined over time. The relative stability in Catholic commitment is all the more noteworthy given that since the late 1990s, there has been a sharp decline both in the proportion of Americans who identify with a religious denomination and in the proportion who report weekly church attendance. In sum, while significant numbers of Catholics may leave the church (Pew Forum 2008), the snapshot of current Catholics that our surveys capture at any one point in time (e.g., 1987, 1993, 1999, 2005), suggests that despite Catholic fluidity (due to people leaving, the aging of current cohorts, the influx of new immigrants), the level of commitment of those who are Catholic at a given time is not dramatically changing. And yet we certainly live in a changing church and in a changing society where religion is losing some of its supreme salience. Read more

• Source: National Catholic Reporter
• Image: Fr Z's Blog