Biden in the Sunset

 

There is a saying about "the best laid plans." President Joe Biden had planned to make a final visit to Rome this week, which would have included a final presidential audience with the Pope, but - dutiful to the end - the President is remaining in the U.S. because of the fires in California. White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said that the President has canceled his trip “to remain focused on directing the full federal response in the days ahead.”

Our second Catholic president (unlike the first one) has never been shy about his faith and has highlighted his Catholicism continuously. In 10 days, he will yield his place as the most prominent U.S. Catholic to Vice President-elect J.D. Vance, a convert whose style of Catholicism may appear somewhat different from Biden's. At least until he leaves the White House, however, Biden has consistently keep his religious commitments at the center of public perception of him.

Biden ("Scranton Joe") represents a particular style of American Catholicism, rooted in the ethnic Church's 20th-century heyday in the northeast. His is a "liberal" style of Catholicism, that talks about "social justice" and sings On Eagle's Wings (which he couldn't resist quoting even in his otherwise excellent eulogy for Jimmy Carter). Biden's style of Catholicism has much to commend it even if, like the President himself, it may appear in some ways to be fading from the American scene. 

U.S. Catholicism is increasingly a broad religious identity comprised of many coexisting, sometimes overlapping, and sometimes competing subcultures. In that mix, Joe Biden may well represent some of the best of 1970s "social justice' On Eagle's Wings Catholicism. When he praised Jimmy Carter's deep Christian faith in his eulogy at the National Cathedral, Biden was unabashedly expressing his own lifelong religious commitments. Describing Carter as "driven and devoted to making real the words of his Savior" and "a good and faithful servant of God," Biden was surely also surely expressing his own aspirations to put his own deep Catholic faith into practice through a political vocation. His is not the only possible style of American Catholicism, and his may not be the only effective way to live out a Catholic political vocation, but it is surely one very fruitful way.

Indeed, as Pope Francis recently wrote in his encyclical letter promoting devotion to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus, "our work as Christians for the betterment of society should not obscure its religious inspiration, for that, in the end, would be to seek less for our brothers and sisters than what God desires to give them" (Dilexit Nos, 205)

Photo: President Biden, Vice President Harris, and former Presidents Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Trump at the State Funeral for Jimmy Carter, Chip Somodevilla/Getty