Biden talks faith, cancer at the Vatican
VATICAN CITY — Vice President Joe Biden came to this tiny city-state to talk about two of his favorite things — curing cancer and his Roman Catholic faith.
At the Third International Regenerative Medicine Conference at the Vatican, Biden spoke about the urgent need to come up with new cures for cancer — a subject that has come to define his final year in office.
The conference is intended to highlight the extraordinary research advances being made with adult stem cells while largely sidestepping the issue of research using fetal tissue or embryonic stem cells.
“Most importantly, we want everyone to understand that no one has to choose between science and faith,” Dr. Robin Smith, president of the Stem for Life Foundation and one of the threeday conference organizers, said in a welcoming speech Tuesday.
‘Genuine opportunity’
It is precisely the sort of delicate dance with faith Biden has performed his entire life — embracing Catholicism along with abortion rights and gay marriage.
The Obama administration, for instance, continues to support funding for fetal tissue research, which is opposed by Catholics and many who oppose abortion.
Biden focused on issues the two sides agreed on.
“The truth is that today, more than at any point in human history, we have a genuine opportunity to help more people all across the world than ever before,” Biden said Friday in a speech to the conference.
Biden’s Roman Catholic upbringing and Irish heritage are, along with his family, his personal touchstones.
He refers to them in many of his speeches and asides. But his political beliefs, including his support for abortion rights and gay marriage, have often put him at odds with Catholic teaching and church leaders.
Last month, Bishop Kevin Rhoades of Fort Wayne-South Bend, Ind., the diocese near the University of Notre Dame, rebuked the school’s leadership for announcing that it would bestow an award on Biden at its spring commencement.
“We should not honor those who claim to personally accept church teaching, but act contrary to that teaching in their political choices,” Rhoades wrote.
Tension with Catholic leaders
Biden has not had to deal with the sort of intense scrutiny that Sen. John Kerry faced in 2004 when he ran for president and faced constant speculation about whether Catholic priests would serve him communion.
Roman Catholic leaders of Delaware, Biden’s home state, never threatened to withhold communion from him, although Bishop Michael Saltarelli, then of Wilmington, persuaded Biden’s high school alma mater in 2006 not to name a new student center after him.
While fiercely committed to the church, Biden often has seemed to take pride in defying parts of its hierarchy. His mother, he often has said, taught him never to kiss the pope’s ring.
And of those who doubted his faith because of his disagreement with Catholic dogma, he once said, in 2005, “The next Republican that tells me I’m not religious, I’m going to shove my rosary down their throat.”