Original Sin (The Book)

 

As anyone who is interested in American politics knows by now, Original Sin (Penguin Random House) by journalists Jake Tapper (CNN) and Alex Thompson (Axios) is not about the primeval sin of Adam, but - in the words of the book's subtitle - President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again. By this week's publication date, so much had been written and said about the book (not to mention all that had already been written and said about the broader topic) that reading the book itself might seem almost redundant.  Yet it is still a very informative exercise.

Enjoyable too as reading, but also tragic as an account of the state of our politics. “The original sin of Election 2024," write the book's authors, "was Biden’s decision to run for re-election — followed by aggressive efforts to hide his cognitive diminishment.” The book is a frightfully step-by-step account of how the people closest to President Biden enabled and facilitated his disastrous determination to run for a second term, paradoxically resulting in the very thing this effort was supposedly all about avoiding - Trump's return to the White House. (That outcome has to be an inseparable part of the analysis. The end result - especially this end result - really matters.) 

It is a genuinely damning indictment of much of the Democratic party's political class, in particular the "Politburo" in the White House and the Biden family itself. In my modest opinion, it should also serve as an indictment of the authors' own journalistic class, which (not for the first time in American history) was also at least somewhat somewhat in the know about the president's aging (or at least the widespread worries about it) and certainly should have been more proactively critical about what was happening.

For the record, I have admired Joe Biden as president and willingly credit him for some very effective leadership both domestically and on the international scene (Ukraine, NATO). Although i voted for someone else in the 2020 primary, by then I knew it would be Joe Biden who would most likely be the one to save the party from Bernie Sanders and save the country from Donald Trump. But none of that meant he should run for a second term. Like the aide quoted in the book, "I love Joe Biden," but "it was a disservice to the country and to the party for his family and advisers to allow him to run again."

The book effectively highlights what is one of the many disadvantages of our presidential system (in contrast to a parliamentary system). The U.S. President is an uncrowned king, and there exists no effective mechanism for replacing him by party leaders or others. Like the Roman Empire of old, our presidential system resembles a mighty monarchy masquerading as a republic. Combine this will the prevailing notion that only two-term presidents are successful (a particularly perverse incentive increasingly built into the modern presidency), combine this with the insulation of modern presidents from public opinion by politically ambitious sycophantic staffs, and finally the widespread acceptance of gerontocracy in the U.S. government, and the inevitable result was the 2024 disaster. "Biden had framed his entire presidency as a pitched battle to prevent Trump from returning to the Oval Office. By not relinquishing power and being honest with himself and the country about his decline, he guaranteed it."

One can acknowledge (as I do) the real accomplishments of the Biden presidency. One can continue to admire the man and to wish him well in this latest health crisis. At a personal level, the story is a truly tragic one. It has been suggested that Biden's difficulties may largely date from the effects of his son Beau's death and then were exacerbated by his son Hunter's personal and legal problems.  

At the same time, the Democratic party and the country need to come to some reckoning about what went wrong in the run-up to 2024 and to acknowledge the colossal errors on the part of the President, his family, his "politburo," and others.

Some would suggest that the even earlier original sin was the selection of Kamala Harris as running mate in 2020. At the time, I thought there were better alternatives available, and it appears from this book that Biden himself may have thought so. But what was bizarre about this was that, once in office as Vice President, Harris, instead of being supported as a possible successor, was widely used as some sort of insurance to justify Biden's running again, on the theory that Harris could not win against Trump. In the end, of course, she didn't win. But had Biden announced at the end of 2022 (after the midterms) that he would not run again, the party primary process might well have chosen either a stronger candidate than Harris or alternately a candidate Harris who was more practiced and better positioned to defeat Trump. Despite his impressive win 2024, Trump's reelection was not inevitable and might have been prevented by a more timely process of raising up a younger more dynamic candidate than Biden.

If I keep harping on the election, it is because the consequence of this tragic chain of events is what matters - has been so, well, consequential. Of course, presidential health issues - and cover-ups - are not new. In fact, they have been all too common and surprisingly consistent. From Woodrow Wilson to FDR to JFK to to Biden, the consistent pattern has been for the political and journalistic classes to obscure the truth from the American people. In this case only, however, has the outcome been so catastrophically consequential for the life of the nation.

In the months before Biden's disastrous debate with Trump in June 2024, like many I assumed there was a distinction between doing the job, which, again like many, I believed Biden still capable of doing adequately, and the performative, communicative parts of the job, which he was obviously failing at, but which I was willing to argue were less important and somewhat overrated by our contemporary media culture. There is, I think, still good reason to believe that Biden remained effective in those areas in which he was most engaged - e.g., Ukraine, NATO, and, after October 7, the war in Gaza. However, he was notably ineffective, for example, on immigration, which turned out to be immensely consequential for the election. Tapper and Thompson cite Senator Michael Bennet (D-CO) who "had come to believe that Biden's inability to mediate between the people in his administration with different political viewpoints had led to an incoherent overall position on the issue" of immigration. And they cite former Chief-of-Staff Ron Klain's belief that Biden's being "kind of locked down in the White House" in 2023 and focused on foreign affairs "had diminished his ability to talk fluidly about a broad range of domestic political issues."

The book's coverage of the final crisis becomes a literal day-by-day account after the debate (which Tapper had co-moderated). That period included the infamous interview with George Stephanopoulos, in which Biden was asked how he would feel if he lost and Trump were re-elected. He replied, "I'll feel good as long as I gave it my all and I did the good as [sic] job as i know I can do, that's what this is about." The authors record Nancy Pelosi's internal reaction that that was not enough, since the stakes were so high. This highlights the apparent conflict between the personal and the political, between the personal President's interest and the public interest.

The other dimension of the crisis which became more evident in the aftermath of the debate was the contrast between what had been claimed about the President's fitness and what the entire debate audience had seen for themselves. Congresswoman Susan Wild (D-PA) articulated this when she said on a congressional Democratic zoom, "If I defend the president, I lose my integrity. How do we go after Trump for lying if people see us as liars?"

In a sense, that summarizes the problem that persists for the Democrats. There are undoubtedly many reasons why the Democrats lost the confidence of American voters, but surely an important contributor was the failure of the Democratic political class to be fully honest about such a serious problem.

It is often remarked how the Republicans seem blinded to political reality by partisanship and an apparent personalty cult. This story suggests that, for a time at least, so were the Democrats. In the end, the Democrats recovered, but too late.

Nicaea + 1700

 

The "Nicene Creed" (technically called the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed) which we sing or say at Mass every Sunday is an expansion by the First Ecumenical Council of Constantinople (381) of the original creed composed at the First Ecumenical Council of Nicaea (325). We rightly refer to its as the Nicene Creed, however, given that the fundamental work was done at that first Council, convened by Emperor Constantine, which first assembled 1700 years ago today. It had been one of the late Pope Francis' fond hopes to travel to Iznik, Turkey, the site of the Council of Nicaea, sometime this year to commemorate this anniversary with the Ecumenical Patriarch Batholomew.

The Creed itself, which was adopted on June 19, 325, summarizes the result of the Council's deliberations. The Council confirmed and articulated in philosophical language the faith of the Church about who Jesus is and his relationship to his Father and also to us. (According to legend, as recounted by Eusebius of Caesarea, it was the Emperor Constantine himself who suggested the key term homoousios, "consubstantial," to describe the relationship between the Father and the Son.) Nicaea actually initiated a protracted conciliar process of doctrinal definition about who Christ is which would continue at Constantinople in 381, Ephesus in 431, and finally Chalcedon in 481.

When we mention Nicaea, we think especially of how it described the relationship between the Father and the Son within Trinity, but the Nicene Creed continues, elaborating on the mission of the Son and especially highlighting his incarnation. (Anyone above a certain age can recall dropping to his or her knees when the Creed got to the words et incarnatus est.)

Nicaea did other things as well. Famously, its decision on the determination of the date of Easter, a calculation which all Christians still follow (albeit with different calendars), highlighted Christianity's fundamental relationship with its parent religion of Judaism. 

But the Creed and the philosophical formulations which the Creed enshrines remain the great and lasting legacy of Nicaea. I remember many years ago a conversation with a now-deceased confrere who was speculating whether the Church might have been better served had she not adopted Greek philosophical formulations for expressing doctrines. In response, I repeated the obvious observation that this was how the Church learned to speak to the wider late-Roman culture, which her evangelizing mission required. How, I asked, could the Church have spoken to the wider world had she not adopted Greek philosophical formulas? My confrere answered that the Church would surely have found a way, to which I replied that, well, that was exactly what the Church did at Nicaea! The Church found a way to speak intelligibly to the world at Nicaea, and Nicaea remains the model for what the Church must continue to do in relating to the world.

"In the One, We Are One"

 

At his first appearance as Supreme Pontiff, our Augustinian Pope Leo XIV quoted one of Saint Augustine's more famous sayings, With you I am a Christian; for you I am a bishop. So, it should surprise no one that the new Pontiff's Coat of Arms contains an Augustinian motif: a closed book with a heart pierced by an arrow, a reference to Saint Augustine's description of his conversion experience, Vulnerasti cor meum verbo tuo (“You have pierced my heart with your Word”). Likewise, the Pope's heraldic motto, In Illo uno unum ("In the One, we are one")  is taken from Saint Augustine’s Exposition on Psalm 127, where he noted that although we Christians are many, we are one in the one Christ.

Much of the media coverage of our new Pope has, understandably, focused on popular perceptions of him and his election and interesting vignettes from his life story. Alternately, much of the media coverage has, equally understandably, emphasized the possible political implications of this new pontificate. That is all fine as far as it goes. But, of course the papacy is more than just another human interest story, and it is infinitely more than yet another player in our contentious contemporary politics.

It has often been remarked that Sunday Mass in a typical American Catholic parish may be one of the very few places remaining where different people of different ethnicities and economic classes and of different political parties and conflicting opinions still assemble together and share in a common experience. This is a most amazing and pastorally suggestive opportunity for our politically polarized and empathy-challenged society.  It is an opportunity - for which the Church is uniquely equipped - to demonstrate the unity it professes, to pour oil on the troubled waters of modern society, as Servant of God Isaac Hecker remarked to Blessed Pope Pius IX in 1857.

Politics is about the organization of our very human, very finite communal life. Inevitably, it involves disagreements - and provides mechanisms to resolve disagreements. The intensely polarized disagreements we currently experience, however, are not just the inevitable accompaniment of disagreements about finitely human practical concerns, but the result of a profoundly perverse loss of empathy, which has become increasingly common in recent years. That lack of empathy, that failure to recognize a neighbor in the other, is what so severely poisons our politics today.

In Illo uno unum ("In the One, we are one")  reminds us that all others are also neighbors. What human unity we have failed to achieve by natural means has been freely made possible for us by the grace of Christ, in whom all human divisions have become secondary.

No one who was not part of the conclave can assert with any certainty how much or how little contemporary political considerations may have contributed to the election of the 267th Pope. But, as I suggested in my first reflections upon this Pope's election, perhaps inadvertently, in electing a Pope from the U.S., the Cardinals may have have done the world and especially the U.S. an unexpected service in presenting the world with an alternative, empathetic, unifying type of American leader, different from what we have increasingly become accustomed to. 

Pope Leo XIV

 

The College of Cardinals have elected as successor of Saint Peter a Chicago-born American, Augustinian friar and missionary Bishop, Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost, 69, who has taken the name Pope Leo XIV.

Growing up in the Bronx in the 1950s and 1960s, I received my initial religious formation from the Augustinian Friars of the Province of Saint Thomas of Villanova, who staffed the parish I lived in and who taught in my high school. That - and my longstanding intellectual interest in and devotion to the great Doctor gratiae Saint Augustine - all added to my evident excitement when his name was announced. An American Pope! An Augustinian! His Order's former Prior General and a long-time missionary Bishop in Peru!

As an American, a member of an international Religious Order, and a missionary Bishop in Peru (Bishop of Chiclayo, 2014-2023) the new Pope spans the New World and the Old World, the rich First World and the poor Global South. He is well positioned to be a unifying figure in a Church and a world which seem so destructively divided. A spiritual son of Saint Augustine, whose charism he referenced in his opening remarks from the loggia, he has also, by his choice of name, implicitly identified himself with the great 19th-century Pope Leo XIII (1878-1903), the Pope of Rerum Novarum and Aeterni Patris. Our new Pope's opening address from the central loggia of Saint Peter's highlighted his commitment to the tradition of Catholic social teaching so long associated with Pope Leo XIII's response to the industrial revolution. 

Before giving his first Urbi et Orbi Blessing, our new Pope greeted the world with the greeting of the Risen Christ, Peace be with you. Prior to today, it was widely assumed that no one from the U.S. would likely be elected Pope. (His membership in an international religious order and his decades of service in Latin America obviously balance his U.S. origin.) Perhaps, however, in electing a Pope from the U.S., the Cardinals have done the world and especially the U.S. an unexpected service in offering an alternative image of American leadership. In Leo XIV, the Church and the world have someone who represents the beyond-borders global character of the Universal Church and its commitment to the poor and the marginalized. That's actually rather basic and in itself somewhat unsurprising, but it is in conspicuous contrast to so many of the values currently associated with the U.S. both domestically and on the world stage. 

Habemus Papam

 

Habemus Papam

The College of Cardinals has elected U.S.-born Augustinian Cardinal Robert Prevost, who has taken the name Pope Leo XIV

V. Let us pray for Leo XIV, our Pope.

R. May the Lord preserve him, and give him life, and make him blessed upon the

earth, and deliver him not up to the will of his enemies.

O God, shepherd and ruler of all the faithful,

look favorably on your servant Leo,

whom you have set at the head of your Church as her shepherd;

grant, we pray, that by word and example

he may be of service to those over whom he presides

so that, together with the flock entrusted to his care,

he may come to everlasting life.

Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son,

who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit,

God, for ever and ever. Amen.