George Bush may be an Episcopalian turned Methodist, but he needs vital Catholic votes if he is to become the next President.
Catholics are strongly represented in the mid-west states of Illinois, Michigan, Missouri, Ohio, and Pennsylvania further east, where the pundits say the fate of the election now lies.
The Bush campaign is using a list of two million Catholic voters in these states who are being targeted with phone calls and mailings between now and election day.
These voters will be told about the contrasting position of George Bush and Al Gore on a range of issues and how Mr Bush's stance on abortion, gays and education better represents Catholic values.
Mr Bush's interest in Catholics is not new. At 61 million they are by far the largest denomination in the US. They represent about 30 per cent of the electorate and in past elections have voted mainly Democrat following a temporary swing towards Ronald Reagan in the 1980s.
Several of Mr Bush's advisers have made a close study of Catholic voters and as a result his "compassionate conservatism" deliberately reflects Catholic social teaching and borrows from papal encyclicals and Pope John Paul II.
Mr Bush talks often about "solidarity" and the "common good" and replacing state welfare by funding "faith-based" organisations such as Catholic charities which help the poor.
Mr Bush has made a point during his campaign of meeting Catholic bishops and most of the seven cardinals. This interest in Catholic social ideas and his antiabortion stance helped Mr Bush to survive the storm over his visit to the Bob Jones University in South Carolina during the primary campaign. He was accused of pandering to anti-Catholic bigotry for which that institution has been noted.
Cardinal O'Connor of New York, who was then dying from brain cancer, defended Mr Bush whom he knew personally from charges of anti-Catholicism but Bob Jones cost Mr Bush Catholic votes in the Michigan primary won by Senator John McCain.
The present Bush quest for Catholic votes is sophisticated and distinguishes between lapsed Catholics who are often liberal on social issues and the church-going ones who are usually conservative and have much in common with Protestant evangelicals on matters like abortion, gay rights and schools.
Steve Wagner, a Republican Party consultant who is behind the Catholic vote project, says that "Catholics may be the most maddening electoral group in American politics" for pollsters who try to pin down their likely voting pattern.
The idea that Catholics vote as a bloc was probably never true but came nearest to it when John F. Kennedy was elected the first Catholic President in 1960. E.J. Dionne, a respected Washington Post columnist and himself a Catholic of French-Canadian stock, is dubious about the Wagner theory that the old "social justice" orientation of Catholics is giving way to an emphasis on "social renewal".
These last who are the ones targeted by Mr Bush, are "Mass-attending" Catholics who see the country in "moral decline", are suspicious of popular culture and worry that the federal government is "inflicting harm on the nation's moral character".
Mr Dionne argues that "many Catholics favour both social justice and social renewal" but that the Wagner theory is useful for Republicans. Certainly it is now evident in Mr Bush's political philosophy inveighing against the evils of "big government" and tying that label onto Mr Gore.
Mr Bush's insistence on taking power away from Washington and leaving the states to make more decisions also ties in with the Catholic concept of "subsidiarity" whereby social problems are best dealt with at local or regional level rather than by a central bureaucracy.
Mr Gore had been leading in the polls among white Catholics but now Mr Bush is leading. Mr Gore's determined pro-abortion stance and his support, like that of President Clinton for the so-called "partial birth abortion" of late-term foetuses, alienates many church-going Catholics.
But Mr Bush has to soft pedal his own "pro-life" stance as he seeks the support of women voters who are "pro-choice."
This has irritated the Christian right organisations, such as the influential Christian Coalition of the Rev Pat Robertson, which prevented any attempt to water down the strong anti-abortion stance in the Republican policy document at the convention last August.
But Mr Robertson, who once ran for the presidency himself, knows that for Mr Bush to campaign on a strong anti-abortion message would lose him the election.
The best hope for those who want the Supreme Court to reverse its Roe v. Wade decision which legalised abortion in 1973 is for Mr Bush to become President and then appoint conservative judges when vacancies occur in the court.
A large number of Catholics are Irish-American and they tend to be Democratic voters especially if they are blue-collar workers or "middle class" as they are now called by Al Gore who promises to fight for them against the big corporations. But an increasing number of Catholics are now Hispanic or Latino immigrants who are in the lowest paid jobs and need all the help they can get.
They are unlikely to vote for the man whose Republican Party regularly opposes raising the paltry minimum wage. Maybe the Bush advisers should study Catholic social teaching on the "just wage".