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  <Kennedy's speech was a wink-wink that he would not take orders from the Vatican over ...>
  The speech was not a "wink-wink": it was a straightforward assertion that he would not take orders from the Vatican over anything. The historical/theological context was that in 1960, the Catholic Church still taught that the notions of separation of church and state and of religious freedom were anathema. (Vatican II's Declaration on Religious Liberty was still five years in the future.) Most American Catholics did not know these things and few would have agreed with them -- but the ministers to whom Kennedy was speaking did know them, and at least some of them had good-faith concerns about how those ideas would translate into presidential policy (this despite the fact that American Catholics had fought and died in every American war and had held virtually every other public office at every level of government and served honorably.)