Joe Biden and Catholicism in the United States

Massimo Faggioli

• Publisher: Twenty-Third Publications/Bayard
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781627856171
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Christliche Konfessionen

A powerful examination of the role of Catholicism in U.S. politics and in the life of Joseph R. Biden

After a dramatic election amid a raging pandemic, racial violence, economic collapse and historic national divisions that have threatened our democracy, Joe Biden succeeds Donald Trump as the 46 th President of the United States. For Catholics, this is a momentous occasion in US public life, as he is the second Catholic to be elected to the nation's highest office, joining John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

In 2021, Joe Biden becomes president in a very different situation than Kennedy's America. Today, Catholics play a much broader and more visible role in the public life of our country, and the triangle of relations between the White House, the Vatican, and the US Catholic Church is an essential dimension for understanding the political and religious urgency of this moment in our history.

In this ground-breaking book, historian and theologian Dr. Massimo Faggioli provides an insightful overview of Catholicism in US politics, and its place as an anchor in the life of the man elected to lead the country at a decisive crossroads, an unprecedented moment in US history.

CHAPTER ONE
Introduction: Catholicism and Public Life in the United States

1. From Kennedy to Biden, by Way of The West Wing

During the first 230 years of history of the United States, the great majority of the nation’s presidents were members of Christian churches other than Catholic; most were Episcopalian, Presbyterian, Methodist, or Baptist. Joe Biden is the second Catholic president, after John F. Kennedy’s brief term sixty years ago. That alone made the 2020 U.S. election historically notable, distinctive in both the political and religious history of the United States. But in addition to this, another set of circumstances made it an extraordinary election: Biden was elected during the devastation of the COVID-19 pandemic, after months of nationwide protests against racially motivated violence, and following a presidential administration that threatened and struck real blows against the rule of law and world order. All this was happening while the newly elected president’s own Church has endured internal divisions among its American members like no other church and like never before in modern history.

Biden’s presidency arouses not only political expectations but also religious, even salvific ones. This Catholic president is now called upon to heal the moral and physical damage inflicted upon the nation by Trump, the pandemic, and globalization. He is the fourth Catholic to run for the American presidency (besides Kennedy, after Al Smith in 1928 and John Kerry in 2004). It is an office that is political but also moral and religious, and he begins it in a moment of delicate transition for both the nation and the Catholic Church.

The election of a Catholic to the presidency has historical value not only because this is only the second time it has happened but also because it allows us to closely examine the Catholic question in the United States: What does it mean to be both Catholic and American? Throughout American history, in ways not faced by members of other Christian churches, Catholics have had to engage in a certain kind of negotiation and mediation with their own Church, both on the national level and in terms of their relationship with the Vatican.

Biden’s election is part of a particular historical moment of acceleration in the cultural and religious diversification of the country, including its politicians. This was evident in the swearing-in ceremonies of the new members of Congress in January 2019. While many were sworn in as they held their hands on the traditional Christian Bible, others among the new elect swore on the Koran, the Hebrew Bible, the Vedas of Hinduism, or the Buddhist Sutras.

But this is also a particularly Catholic moment. Biden’s election is the culmination of a rise of Catholics in American political life. As of January 20, 2021, the president of the United States, the Speaker of the House, the chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, and five other Supreme Court justices (six out of nine in all) are Catholic. To be sure, the clear division of Catholics into two different ideological and political camps means that any talk of a Catholic takeover in America is misplaced. Catholicism has come far in two centuries in the context of the nation’s political life, but it is also very different from what it was at the time of John Kennedy. For the first Catholic president, his being Catholic was a problem for important sectors of the Protestant establishment of the nation; for the second one, the country has no problem with his being Catholic, but a not insignificant segment of the American Church—from among its bishops, its clergy, and its faithful—has a problem with his Catholicism.

Having won numerous elections as a senator since 1973, two national elections to the vice presidency (2008 and 2012), and now one as president in 2020, Joe Biden lacks no political legitimacy. And yet significant sectors of the Catholic (and otherwise Christian) electorate question his moral legitimacy. In the political history of the United States, Biden was not the first Catholic to run for or be elected to the presidency, but he is the first to do so while rising above and overcoming deep divisions within the American Catholic Church.

From the point of view of popular culture, as a Catholic president, Biden follows the most famous president in entertainment history, the fictional Jed Bartlet of The West Wing, the television drama conceived by Aaron Sorkin that aired for eight seasons (1999–2006) on NBC. An economist, Nobel laureate, and University of Notre Dame alumnus, the Bartlet character—played and, at least in his Catholicism, modeled by the Catholic actor Martin Sheen—never had to deal with the political and religious polarization within U.S. Catholicism that exists today. Bartlet’s liberal and at the same time devoted Catholicism is not unlike Biden’s. But the American Catholicism depicted in The West Wing is closer to Kennedy’s—at ease with the mainstream, ambivalent about the morality of abortion and the death penalty, but with ambivalence that remains on the level of individual conscience rather than fueling fundamental divisions within the Church or between the Church and society. It is Catholicism as it was before the neoconservative and neo-traditionalist storm that was developing at the time depicted in the show and that has now reached a new theological, cultural, and political stage. It’s the long wave and the American Catholic version of the “revenge of God” about which Gilles Kepel wrote three decades ago.¹

In a country where political faiths have taken on a theological and dogmatic intensity, the renewed consideration of America as a political and moral project sees in American Catholicism a particular case study, one that includes convulsions within the body of the Church that reflect the external crisis of globalization and world order. The links between theology and politics on the national and international scenes is one of the primary interests of this book, which starts from a specific interest in American Catholicism but can’t fail to consider the turbulence being experienced by global Catholicism in these first decades of the twenty-first century.

At the same time, there is a national context from which we must begin. Why does the election of a Catholic president deserve so much attention? On one hand, there is the visible role that Biden’s Catholicism played in this election. One struggles to keep track of the times in which he, as a candidate, made direct or indirect references to his Catholicism. In his speech to the nation on December 14, after the certification of the electoral college vote, Biden concluded by referring to the prayer popularly connected to St. Francis of Assisi: “So, as we start the hard work to be done, may this moment give us the strength to rebuild this house of ours upon a rock that can never be washed away, as in the prayer of Saint Francis, for where there is discord, union, where there is doubt, faith, where there is darkness, light. This is who we are as a nation. This is the America we love. And that is the America we are going to be. So, thank you all. May God bless you, and may God protect our troops and all those who stand watch over our democracy.”² In his pre-Christmas speech, delivered on December 22, Biden quoted the German Jesuit Alfred Delp, an important figure in the Catholic resistance against Hitler, executed by the Nazis in February 1945, at the age of thirty-seven: “He wrote, ‘Advent is a time for rousing.’ Delp believed, at first, we are shaken to our depths, and then we’re ready for a season of hope. As a nation, we’ve certainly been shaken to our depths this year. Now it’s time to wake, to get moving, a time for hope. We’ve gotten through tough times before in this nation. We’ll get through these difficult times as well. We’ll do it by coming together, by working with one another.”³

Biden made his Catholic faith a central part of the campaign, and he proved once again that Catholicism has a prominent place in the American project—a political, civil, social, and cultural project. On the other hand, it is a Catholicism that has found itself in conflict in a variety of ways and at various times on some key issues in public life in the United States.⁴

2. Six Key Issues for American Catholicism in the Public Square

The first issue is about the compatibility between “papist” Catholicism and Protestant America, founded as a religious project of Christians who had rejected the national churches of Europe but also rejected Catholicism. In 2020, Joe Biden was the fifteenth Catholic to be named (along with Vice President Kamala Harris) “Person of the Year” by Time magazine. Past recipients include Kennedy in 1961, Pope John XXIII in 1963, Pope John Paul II in 1994, Newt Gingrich in 1995, and Pope Francis in 2013. (Francis also made the cover of Rolling Stone the following year). But this acceptance of Catholicism by the American mainstream is not to be taken for granted. As the historian Mark Noll has noted, well into the twentieth century, “to most American Protestants, Catholicism seemed as alien to treasured political values as it was antithetical to true Christianity.”⁵

Anti-Catholicism in the United States has a long and bloody history. The hegemony and power of White Anglo-Saxon Protestants led to a marginalization of the French and especially Spanish Catholicism that was present in the northern part of North America well before the arrival of the Pilgrims in the early seventeenth century. In the pre-Civil War period, white Protestants often mounted violent protests against Catholic immigrants over the perceived threat of “papism” influencing the way Catholics might vote.

Recognition of the compatibility between American society and the Catholic faith was slowed by the mid-nineteenth-century “Romanization” of American Catholicism, which emphasized a spirit of obedience to the hierarchical authority of the Church and loyalty to the papacy. In these years, pro-Roman ultramontanism prevailed over a Catholicism inspired by the American liberal tradition of intellectual independence and adapted to the European Catholic model.⁶ Until the mid-twentieth century, a clear anti-Catholic prejudice existed in America, an aura of suspicion of those who populated the Catholic subculture (the so-called “Catholic ghetto”). This suspicion only dissipated in the period between World War II and the Second Vatican Council.

During the same time period at the Vatican, American Catholicism was a source of concern and treated as an experiment to be viewed with caution. It is only since 1908 that the Catholic Church in the United States has no longer been designated by Rome as among the “mission territories” that fall under the jurisdiction of the Vatican dicastery known as Propaganda Fide, and not until 1984 did the United States and the Holy See open diplomatic relations at the highest level. The bridge over the Atlantic, stretching between the Vatican and the United States, is still fairly new. Historically, the sensitivity of Catholics on international politics and defense issues can be well understood only in the context of the delicate question of the American Church’s relationship with the Vatican and suspicion of a “conflict of loyalty.”

A second issue involves the relationship between Roman Catholicism and American democracy. It is a story that includes both American political prejudices against nineteenth-century ultramontanism, on one hand, and papal distrust—or, as in Pius IX’s 1864 Syllabus of Errors, outright rejection—of democracy and the separation between church and state on the other. There is a tension, if not contradiction, between nineteenth-century Catholicism and the democratic ethos of the American project. Until the twentieth century, both the Vatican and liberal Catholics in Europe looked with caution at the American experiment, sometimes distancing themselves—as in the 1899 condemnation of Americanism by Leo XIII in Testem Benevolentiae—and at other times identifying public Catholicism in Europe by its differences from the American model (as in the reconstruction after World War II).

At the same time, American Catholics, who have always lacked their own political party (unlike in Europe in the twentieth century) and identified with the Democratic party in the century between the Civil War and the 1970s, did not shirk from the task of contributing to “sustained effort to bind Catholic social thought to democracy, human rights, and religious freedom.”⁷ Beginning in the late 1930s, European Catholic exiles in America urged Catholics to recognize the moral importance of democratic politics and civil liberties, an effort that greatly impacted Catholic political culture both in America and in Europe. The cautious acceptance of Catholicism in America after the Second World War was still based largely on the anti-communist political credentials the Cold War demanded. It was a Catholicism struggling both with American anti-Catholicism and with leadership in Rome uncomfortable with its tendency to adapt to American pluralism.

In the 1960s, Jesuit John Courtney Murray (silenced by the Vatican for nearly a decade prior to Vatican II for his theological work on religious freedom) urged Catholics to find a more temperate balance between Catholic principles and public consensus. Kennedy’s election in 1960, despite an anti-Catholic campaign fueled by leaders of the Protestant establishment, brought peace (or at least an armistice) between Catholicism and political modernity. The Second Vatican Council’s contribution to reconciliation between Catholicism and constitutional democracy—especially through its Constitution on the Church in the Modern Worl...