This was no landslide: Half of the Catholic vote went to Obama and 48 percent chose Romney, according to a survey by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life. That was down slightly from Obama’s 54 percent in 2008.
But this win this year is more significant because it came after Catholic leadership painted a target on the president’s back, beginning with its revolt against Obamacare’s mandate that insurers provide coverage for contraception in employee health plans, even at Catholic hospitals and universities.
The church called that a "threat to religious freedom."
In addition, Catholic leaders such as Newark Archbishop John Myers instructed followers to base their votes on abortion and same-sex marriage. Translation: Don’t vote Obama.
Nevertheless, Obama courted the wider Catholic vote.
Democrats and Republicans both had New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan deliver a closing prayer at their national conventions.
But Democrats also invited a Catholic nun who drove the "nuns on the bus" movement, which emphasized Christ’s call to help the poor and criticized Paul Ryan’s federal budget proposal for its failure to do so.
The bishops’ frontal assault on the president didn’t fail entirely. Catholics who regularly attend church favored Romney, just as white evangelical Christians did.
But the vote demonstrated the church hierarchy’s limited reach over the larger flock of people who call themselves Catholic.
For example: Though 60 percent of white Catholics voted for Romney, about 75 percent of Hispanic Catholics chose Obama. Obama also won among black Protestants, Jews and those with no religious affiliation.
The Catholic church’s political problems are parallel in some ways to those of the Republican Party.
Its leadership is old, almost exclusively white and increasingly out of touch with its broader audience.
And as both the church and GOP shrink as a percentage of the population, each has grown more extreme in its conservative views.
Neither forecasts a winning strategy for organizations that hope to stay relevant in a rapidly changing America.