None of this year's main presidential candidates is Catholic. So how has anti-Catholic bigotry raised its ugly head in the campaign when the election of John F. Kennedy 40 years ago was supposed to have exorcised that nastiness for good?
You can blame Bob Jones, George Bush or John McCain. Bob Jones is not running for president but he founded a strictly Protestant university which his grandson, Bob Jones III, now heads and which George Bush used to kick off his successful South Carolina campaign.
The visit to Bob Jones paid off as Bush gathered the vast majority of conservative Christian votes and stopped the McCain bandwagon. But the next Republican primary was in Michigan which, unlike South Carolina, has an important Catholic electorate.
The McCain campaign paid almost $1 million to a tele-marketing company to make thousands of calls to Catholic voters practically saying that Bush was an anti-Catholic bigot because he did not condemn the university's description of Catholicism as a "cult", or its ban on inter-racial dating, when he campaigned there. McCain first denied any link with the calls but later admitted his role after the polls had closed.
Anti-Catholic bigotry charges had already been flying around on Capitol Hill since the Republican leadership in the House of Representatives rejected a Catholic priest, the Rev Timothy O'Brien, in favour of a Protestant minister for the post of chaplain although he had been the choice of an advisory committee. A Catholic priest has never been appointed to this prestigious post in over 200 years.
In fact, there are more Catholics among Republicans in the house than any other denomination and they are feeling the heat in an election year as Democrats stir the chaplain controversy.
But George Bush is the man who has most to lose by being tarred as anti-Catholic as he heads into the primary election in New York, where 46 per cent of the registered Republicans are Catholic. Bush has written a letter of apology to Cardinal O'Connor of New York, the most prominent member of the Hierarchy and a family friend but now seriously ill with cancer.
John McCain stirred the religious pot further when he unleashed an attack on the Rev Pat Robertson and the Rev Jerry Falwell, leaders of the religious right, for what he sees as their harmful influence on the Republican Party in recent years. This mix of religion and politics is bizarre in a country where the Constitution lays down the formal separation of Church and State and the Supreme Court has forbidden non-denominational prayers in public schools.
The liberal New York Times believes that McCain has done the Republican Party a service by exposing the religious right for its "bullying influence" on the party. But other observers point out that the influence of Robertson and Falwell has been steadily diminishing and, in the words of William Bennett, who served in Reagan's cabinet, "they continue to loom far larger in the liberal imagination than in the real world."
Bennett, who is Catholic and came near to endorsing McCain, now distances himself from him. "The blast against Messrs Robertson and Falwell is the worst manifestation of an emerging pattern with Mr McCain." He "demonises" his opponents and "that has no place in American political discourse", Bennett says.
Bush has been shaken by the anti-Catholic charge, which is widely regarded as unfair and inaccurate - his brother Jeb converted to Catholicism and married a Catholic. But his judgment in going to Bob Jones University is seen as poor for a candidate who began his campaign with the slogan of "compassionate conservatism" and boasted how he could reach out to Democrats and ethnic minorities in his native Texas.
Many Irish-American Catholics, whom Bush hopes to attract as the successors of the "Reagan Democrats" of the 1980s, know that Bob Jones University has strong links to the Rev Ian Paisley. A widely-read columnist, John Leo, reminded them this week that Bob Jones jnr, son of the founder, was "a close friend and ally of Ian Paisley, the rabidly anti-Catholic leader of Northern Ireland's Democratic Unionist Party. In 1966, two days after Paisley was released from prison, Jones travelled to Northern Ireland to give Paisley an honorary degree," Mr Leo wrote.
While 70 million American Catholics are now about a quarter of the population their political allegiances are not fixed. Exit polls show that President Nixon in 1972 was the first Republican President to win most Catholic voters. Since then no President has been elected who did not also win a majority of the Catholic vote, it is claimed.