The first pope from the Americas said his first Mass on U.S. soil to canonize the first Hispanic-American saint. Was the second Roman Catholic president in attendance?

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush attended the canonization Mass on Wednesday for Junipero Serra, an 18th-century missionary who brought Christianity to large swaths of Mexico and California. The Republican candidate's presence went unremarked from the altar, as Bush and his wife blended into the crowd of thousands who attended the Mass at the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington.

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If elected, Bush would be just the second Catholic president; John F. Kennedy was the first. But ahead of the pope's arrival, Bush downplayed the political significance of his attendance at the Mass and the pope's visit in general.

“The pundits would like to make him out to be a politician, but his charge is much greater than that: He is the spiritual leader to the largest group of Christians on Earth and an inspiration to all people of goodwill,” Bush wrote in a CNN op-ed published late Tuesday.

The Bush campaign is clearly using the papal visit to woo Catholic voters. On Tuesday, the Catholic news site Crux reported, three former ambassadors to the Holy See were endorsing Bush. In his op-ed, Bush notes he led the U.S. delegation to former Pope Benedict XIV’s inaugural Mass in 2005 and says “members of [his] family were blessed to meet Pope John Paul II.”

"Gov. Bush is a proven conservative leader with a genuine and deeply held Catholic faith," James Nicholson, one of the three ambassadors to endorse Bush, said in a statement. "His faith informs his commitment to protecting life, defending religious liberty, and ensuring that all Americans have opportunities to pursue the American Dream."

Jeb's father and brother (who are Protestant) split the Catholic vote with their Democratic opponents in their four presidential runs, according to media exit polls archived at Georgetown University. George H.W. Bush earned 52 percent of the Catholic vote in his 1988 landslide win over Massachusetts Gov. Mike Dukakis, and George W. Bush earned the same margin when defeating then-Sen. John Kerry in 2004.

But the Catholic vote Jeb Bush is pursuing is much different from the one his father and brother sought. While there are still plenty of ethnic Irish and Italians in the Northeast and French Cajuns in Louisiana, Hispanic voters now make up one-third of the Catholic population in the United States, according to the Pew Hispanic Center. And while Catholics were once packed into Northeastern states like Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, more and more now live in Texas and California.

Bush, whose Mexican-born wife is Catholic, converted to Catholicism 20 years ago and has spoken lovingly of his adopted faith ever since.

"I love the sacraments of the Catholic Church, the timeless nature of the message of the Catholic Church, the fact that the Catholic Church believes in, and acts on, absolute truth as its foundational principle and doesn’t move with the tides of modern times," Bush said in a speech in Italy in 2009 first reported by The New York Times.

In Pope Francis, Bush has an incredibly popular pontiff to associate himself with. Sixty-three percent of Americans view Pope Francis favorably, according to a CNN poll released earlier this week. (Bush's approval rating is a bit lower: CNN found only 34 percent of Americans had a favorable opinion of him and 46 percent had an unfavorable opinion.)

But Francis' emphasis on the Church's more liberal stances on economic issues — its emphasis on aiding the poor, its skeptical view of capitalism and its emphasis on protecting the environment and fighting climate change — puts Bush in a tough position of violating either Catholic or conservative dogma.

"I don’t get economic policy from my bishops or my cardinals or my pope," Bush told reporters in New Hampshire in June, not long after Pope Francis released an encyclical focused on environmental protection, adding: "I think religion ought to be about making us better as people, less about things [that] end up getting into the political realm."

On areas where Bush agrees with Francis, he's more likely to cite the pope's influence. In his op-ed, Bush said the pope can remind Americans to "advocate for the unborn" and to "protect religious freedom and the right of conscience while respecting those with opposing views."

Bush is not the only presidential hopeful who will get to see the pope in Washington, as Sens. Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, Rand Paul and Lindsey Graham will all attend the pontiff's address to Congress on Thursday, as will Ben Carson, as a guest of Rep. Mark Sanford of South Carolina.