PERSONAL, NOT POLITICAL
U.S. President Biden's Catholicism is all about healing. Now, he leads a suffering nation
Pitching himself as president, Joe Biden promised to heal America's hurting soul. His experiences with suffering and healing were well known, including the deaths of his wife and two of his children, his struggle against stuttering and many political losses. On a bigger stage than ever, Biden was trying to show the country how he did it.
Through his Catholic faith.
“For me, faith, it's all about hope and purpose and strength,” Biden said in a February video ad. “Faith sees best in the dark.”
“Weeping may endure for the night, but joy cometh in the morning,” he quoted from the Book of Psalms in October.
Now, new American President Biden will lead a nation deeply in need of healing — with soaring coronavirus cases, thousands dying daily and millions out of work and hunkered down in isolation. But he is facing not one America but two, each claiming with new religious fervour that God and righteousness are on its side.
As divided as any are Biden's own people, U.S. Catholics, with millions who don't even see him as a legitimate Catholic at all, because of his support for abortion access and LGBT equality.
The question is how the country will adjust to a man whose faith doesn't feature literal Bible-waving promises to “save Christianity” or threats that political opponents might eliminate God.
Biden presents a less common image: a devout, churchgoing liberal. The country will observe for the first time a president who goes to mass every Sunday, plus on Catholic feast days, and sprinkles conversation casually with scripture, religious hymns and references to religious history, but describes faith's purpose in general, inclusive terms — as sustenance for the weary, encouragement for the suffering and an obligation to welcome and care for one another.
Catholicism and its structures — its poetry, humour, teachings, rituals — have always been how Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. has understood healing, others and himself.
“Catholicism and family provide the substructure of his life ...
That's his whole conception of how society works,” said Evan Osnos, a writer for The New Yorker who recently published a book on Biden and his 2020 run for president. “It's more personal than political. That's what separates him from 2021 in Washington, D.C., where there are few ways in which religion is not part of politics. Biden doesn't go out of his way to make it that.”
“I think he'll try very hard like he always does at everything to bring people together and build bridges,” said Sen. Bob Casey, a Pennsylvania Democrat who grew up in the same Catholic community of Scranton as Biden. “He'll have more patience than I would have.”
Millions of Americans hungry for a faith focused on healing and inclusion will embrace it — especially on the left, where believers have felt trampled into non-existence by the religious right since the 1970s.
Millions of others will reject Biden's version of religiosity, one that's less tied to doctrine, less likely to honour religious conservatives' legal demands, less invested in America as a Christian nation.
But what makes Biden different, says Villanova University theologian Massimo Faggioli — whose spiritual biography of the president is being published this month — is that he's unapologetic.
“Joe Biden is a Catholic in the public square who doesn't take lectures from bishops about what being Catholic is about. This is totally new,” Faggioli said.
His desire to be a uniter will be tested quickly on the religious front. On Jan. 29, nine days after Biden's inauguration, perhaps the largest annual gathering of U.S. Catholics will take place blocks from the White House: the March for Life, where tens of thousands of mostly Catholic abortion opponents rally. The march has become heavily Republican in recent years, filled with abortion opponents willing to overlook now-former president Trump's record-breaking number of executions and his laissez-faire approach to a virus that has killed hundreds of thousands in the U.S. In 2020, Trump became the first U.S. president to speak live at the march. This year, it will undoubtedly feature many speakers challenging Biden's faith.
But Biden has long pushed back on the idea that, for him, faith must lead to policies.
“I'm prepared to accept doctrine on a whole range of issues as a Catholic ... I'm prepared to accept as a matter of faith — my wife and I, my family — the issue of abortion. But what I'm not prepared to do is impose a rigid view, a precise view ... that is born out of my faith, on other people who are equally God-fearing, equally as committed to life,” Biden told the Jesuit magazine America in a 2015 videotaped interview.
Yet Biden has bound up his promises to make significant social change in areas from health care to the environment with that to “restore the soul of the nation.” If he is a healer, Biden has an epic pastoral challenge.