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| Biden and Pope Francis |
Presumptive President-elect Joe Biden has let it be known throughout his half century long political career that he is a Kennedy Catholic; in some quarters, Kennedy Catholicism is called cultural Catholicism.
Biden helpfully explained cultural Catholicism to Jack
Jenkins, a reporter for Religion News Service (RNS) last November. The RNS
piece is titled Joe
Biden, president-elect at last, was shaped by a very American Catholic faith: The way he manages his allegiance to
Catholicism gives a glimpse of how Biden will govern as he takes hold of an
office he has sought since 1988.
The piece lifts several quotes from Biden’s book “Promises to Keep: On Life in Politics.”
“I’m as much a cultural Catholic as I am a theological
Catholic,” Biden wrote. “My idea of self, of family, of community, of the wider
world comes straight from my religion. It’s not so much the Bible, the
beatitudes, the Ten Commandments, the sacraments, or the prayers I learned.
It’s the culture.”
Jenkins offers the following gloss: Cultural Catholicism is “a
form of faith that experts," many of them cultural Catholics, "describe as profoundly Catholic in ways that
resonate with millions of American believers: It offers solace in moments of
anxiety or grief, can be rocked by long periods of spiritual wrestling and is
more likely to be influenced by the quiet counsel of women in habits or one’s
own conscience than the edicts of men in miters.”
One of the “men in miters” is, of course, the Pope.
John Kennedy, a Catholic running for president at a time
when anti-Catholicism was still very much a force to be reckoned with – historian
Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Kennedy’s chief biographer, characterized anti-Catholicism
as the oldest prejudice in the United States – easily disposed of the notion
that he would be the Pope’s cat’s-paw.
A month after Kennedy had met with a group of Protestant pastors,
he travelled to Houston, Texas and there delivered a speech to a second group of
pastors in which he said, “I believe in an America that is officially neither
Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish; where no public official either requests or
accepts instructions on public policy from the Pope.”
That distinction pretty much doused irrational fears that
Kennedy as president would simply be an agent of the Vatican.
Since Kennedy’s day, many Catholics have served their
country in various positions with distinction and fidelity both to their church
and to the Constitution that they promised on oath to uphold. Catholicism, even the Catholicism of Popes, is not incompatible with patriotism.
Biden, Jenkins makes clear, likes the “culture” of
Catholics, nuns and rosary beads, which he carries with him in his pocket. Cultural
Catholicism, we are given to understand, is balanced in his thought processes with
the theology of his church. The difficulty here is that there are among us cultural
Catholics in open warfare against Catholic theology as explicated by the
historic Catholic Church, the Popes down through the ages, and leading Catholic
clerics.
“Biden’s personal connection to the faith,” Jenkins notes, “remains
a highly visible part of his political persona. He carries a rosary at all
times, fingering it during moments of anxiety or crisis. When facing brain
surgery after his short-lived presidential campaign in 1988, he reportedly asked
his doctors if he could keep the beads under his pillow. Earlier this year,
rival Pete Buttigieg noticed Biden holding a rosary backstage before
a primary debate.”
Hilaire Belloc – author of the Road to Rome, close friend of G.K. Chesterton and an unapologetic Catholic
– also carried rosary beads with him. One day, campaigning for Parliament, he
was accosted by a lady who shouted out to him from the crowd surrounding his campaign
stump that he was a “papist.”
Belloc drew the rosary from his pocket and said to the lady,
“Madam, do you see these beads. I pray on them every night before I go to
sleep, and every morning when I awake. And, if that offends you, madam, I pray
God he will spare me the ignominy of representing you
in Parliament.”
Unlike Biden, Belloc's rosary was more than a totem for him;
it was the copula that linked him, both theologically
and culturally, to the Catholic Church, ancient and modern, rolling through the
years from Peter, the Rock against which the gates of Hell shall not prevail,
to the sometimes twisted post-paganism of the post-modern 21st century..
Kennedy’s sword of sundering has two cutting edges. The post-modern cultural Catholic suffers from inordinate pride; he really does think himself
not only politically superior to popes, doubtful, but also
superior to his church in matters of theology, faith and morals -- supremely
doubtful.
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