When Rick Santorum claimed that JFK’s 1960 ‘separation of church and state’ Houston campaign speech made him want to throw up, he was rightly criticized for it. Kathleen Townsend for the Washington Post said ‘Either Santorum doesn’t know his American history or he is purposefully rewriting it.’ Working in the wonderful New York State Archives in Albany this week I found a great deal of material on Catholic religious school aid controversies, which shed light on the history of US anti-Catholicism and ‘Wall of Separation between Church and State’ rhetoric. Since Santorum is a Catholic and so was JFK, along with fully a quarter of all Americans, examining such materials may help us to understand why Santorum made such remarks, …