Our Very Catholic President
The strange miracle of Joe Biden
It was a simple story. On his trip to the G7 summit in Cornwall, England, the 46th president of the United States attended Mass on Sunday as he always does. He didn’t make a fuss of it. It was not broadcast; it was not on the official public schedule; the usual parishioners at Sacred Heart Catholic church had no idea what was in store for them.
“I think gobsmacked is probably a very true word,” Annie Fitzpatrick, who was at the service, told the AP. “It’s quite amazing, we went into the church and they took some details from us and I thought this is a bit unusual. About 10 minutes into the service the doors opened up and President Biden and Dr. Jill Biden walked in and just sat in the pew just across from me.” And at the sign of peace, they shook hands, Catholic to Catholic.
The anonymity was part of the point. At Mass, we are all equal; we are all sinners; there is no hierarchy among communicants; an American president has no more standing here than the old lady in a veil who has been coming for decades, or the homeless person who has wandered in, or the baby bawling in someone’s arms. Biden gets this in his bones, which accounts for this quiet but total adherence to Catholic norms. In this, his Catholicism is deep, even structural to his worldview. And, in my view, it helps explain a lot about him and his priorities — perhaps more acutely than any other lens.
He is immediately recognizable to many of us: the grandfather who carries a Rosary in his pocket, who prays sincerely and undemonstratively, and who has a big, open and warm heart, and a not-terribly-consistent mind. He is not pious outside of church: “I’m as much as a cultural Catholic as I am a theological Catholic. My idea of self, of family, of community, of the wider world comes straight from my religion.”
He was formed by nuns; and he can hang with the boys, the union leaders and members, the men in the local bar, and talk their language. But he is also deeply connected to the women in his life, instinctively protective of their dignity and equality, eager to better understand their perspective, in a way that is also deeply Catholic. Men and women are complementary in the Catholic vision, not opposed, and not one subordinate to the other. Yes, the male priesthood and the church hierarchy says one thing; but there is also a profound respect for women, for Our Lady, for Mary Magdalen, and so many saints, rooted in the radically feminist words and acts of Jesus, and Paul. “There is neither male nor female but one in Christ Jesus.” And the Church, of course, has been sustained by women and gay men for centuries.
And then there is suffering. The embrace of pain is deeply woven into the faith; it is seen not as an unmitigated horror, but as a pathway to God and to humility and perspective. We kneel, from childhood onward, in front of a man being tortured on a cross, bent in agony, blood dripping from his side, and see this as integral to our ultimate salvation. And Joe Biden has suffered deeply: the loss of his first wife and youngest child, who was just a year old, in a horrible car crash; and then, the loss to cancer of his beloved son, Beau. Both devastated him — the first leading him to contemplate suicide, the second to abandon a run for president. But Catholicism teaches us that suffering is an alloyed evil and can lead to great good. “There is a crack, a crack in everything,” as Leonard Cohen put it. “That’s how the light gets in.”
This, it seems to me, is also a key to his liberalism: he sees the pain of others and wants to help. It’s why his administration suspended all the Covid rules to allow undocumented children to cross the border with impunity; and is busy attempting to expedite, rather than restrain, mass migration from the South. (Pope Francis would want him to go much further, offering citizenship to anyone who seeks it, and turning no one away.)
It’s why he was such an early defender of gay rights, because he met us and saw the truth of our full humanity, just as Pope Francis has. It’s why he has embraced transgender people as the very marginalized people Jesus himself would have embraced; and why he has backed new welfare proposals to help the poor raise children without having to work, for all its potentially perverse consequences.
His Catholicism is also, to my mind, deeply related to his belief that tackling climate change should be at the center of his economic policies. Pope Francis has rightly put the Christian defense of preserving Creation at the heart of his teaching — Laudato Si, if you haven’t read it, is an astonishing encyclical — and anyone who sees the earth merely as something to be exploited for material gain has no place within the Catholic thought. And then there is the broader message of Catholic social teaching that permeated his first address to the Congress — the notion of a common good, of unity, of collective outreach and mutual obligation.
In all this classic Catholicism, however, Biden is a particular example of the American Catholic. Its strength is its compassion, and its vast diversity of class, race, gender, language and age; its weakness is its somewhat Protestant view of doctrine, which it can often treat as a repository of mere suggestions.
And so Biden, influenced by Catholic Social Teaching, has tragically blurred its essential distinction from Critical Race Theory. Yes, CST has a conception of “structural sin” — primarily deployed by liberation theologians as a critique of capitalism, and rehabilitated in some measure by Francis in his priority for the poor. But it is not rooted in atheism, as CRT is; it does not believe in race essentialism, as CRT does; it does not see the world as purely a function of a zero-sum power struggle between “white” and “nonwhite”, as CRT does; for Catholics, there is “neither Greek nor Jew” — there is only humanity. CST offers salvation in the after-life, while CRT is rooted in the Marxist belief that there are no souls, only bodies, and no life after death, merely death.
In the elegant words of Christopher Devron, S.J., Catholic Social Teaching “approaches racial differences similarly to those who prefer that we emphasize our common humanity. It favors universalism and trusts in our human and God-given capacity to relate to others outside our identity group.” Critical Race Theory sees racial conflict as unending, and irresolvable. In CRT, there is no Catholic imago Dei, no individual human separable from her race or sex. There are only '“structures” and only oppression.
On abortion, the taking of life from the most vulnerable human beings in the world, the unborn, Biden has also shifted in ways he has never really explained. It is possible, I believe, for a Catholic to defend the right to abortion in a free and pluralist society, especially given that it occurs inside a woman’s body, while lamenting that abortion takes place at all, and speaking candidly about its intrinsic moral evil. But Biden has never even gone so far as Bill Clinton’s view that abortion should be “safe, legal and rare.” It is also possible to allow its legality without having the government actively fund it, which was Biden’s position only a couple of years ago, and which he has now reversed. He explains this by saying that it will help the poor get abortions — which is an admirable concern for the poor, but not, exactly, for the unborn.
Equally, Biden supports legislation, like the Equality Act, that profoundly rejects the sexual binary at the core of Catholic teaching, and views biological sex as subordinate to post-modern conceptions of “gender identity”. No Catholic can believe that the distinction between men and women is simply a function of ideology, and not nature. And yes, a Catholic can and should support the dignity and equality of trans people as outliers to the general rule, fully human and authentic, without abandoning church teaching about our bodies and our sex. For good measure, the Equality Act also repeals the Biden-supported Religious Freedom Restoration Act, in order to coerce religious people to violate their consciences. It’s impossible for me to understand a Catholic who seeks to erase other Catholics’ religious freedom.
Biden also supports “equity”, which reductively sees human beings as mere representatives of their race, and treats individual souls as simply fodder for benign social and racial engineering. He has even instructed his entire administration to enforce sex and race discrimination in every aspect of government, and deny jobs to some people because of their race and sex. This is not anti-discrimination, which seeks to ban any extraneous factor from consideration. It is active discrimination, on the basis of involuntary characteristics, regardless of an individual’s worth and ability. I really find it hard to reconcile Catholicism’s understanding of individual dignity with this kind of bigotry, however dressed up it is in the language of progressivism. And then there is Biden’s apparent capitulation to some of the most cringe CRT language: this week, he used the word “Latinx”, a word made up by those who deny biological sex, and applied to a population that loathes the word.
I suspect that Biden hasn’t even thought much about any of this, though I wish he would. And I can see why some would see this as a good thing. When the alternative is Trump, I can see the political logic of concessions to the far left, merely in order to construct a viable, if fragile, coalition against nihilist authoritarianism.
But I wish Biden could see more clearly that it is his Catholicism that could unite a political party around a compassionate center, rather than the neo-Marxism he has partly enabled. It offers a defense of greater support for the poor as a moral and not an ideological position; it provides a defense of environmentalism that could better appeal to non-leftists; it advocates inclusion not to undermine the fiction of “white supremacy” in the US in 2021, but to bring out the full capacities of every person, regardless of identity; it embraces sexual minorities by focusing on individual dignity rather than reducing them to sexual practices; it can make redistribution of wealth not a means to punish the rich but to enhance opportunity and dignity for the struggling; it can defend the police as essential to order, while tackling the abuse of some; and it can restrict immigration to better help integration of new Americans, while avoiding the cruelty that Trump deployed to such nefarious ends. Presenting policies in this rubric, without any theological language, also has the benefit of being far more consonant with Biden’s actual soul than his awkward adoption of woke mantras.
Which means, of course, that denying Biden communion would be the worst possible move by the American Catholic bishops. Biden is imperfect, he is flawed, and he has advanced what I think are ugly ideologies. But in my view, he has done so with good intentions and in good faith. And communion, under Pope Francis, is not a “reward for saints” but “bread for sinners”; and no one should be barred from the Lord’s banquet. Least of all a man so deeply formed by faith, so clearly motivated by the common good, and so indelibly a survivor of the profoundest suffering — to witness the death of your own children. I see something of God’s providence in the emergence of this unlikely and rather ordinary man, in the wake of an unhinged pagan who violated every single Christian commandment and concept every single day.
This Catholic heart is Biden’s secret weapon. Not Catholic dogma; but the Catholic heart. In my view, he should embrace it as the single thread that unites his presidency. Because it is a thread that has the potential to heal us all.
(Note to readers: This is an excerpt of The Weekly Dish. If you’re already a subscriber, click here to read the full version. This week’s issue also includes: a big and particularly brutal batch of reader dissents over my continued focus on CRT; my frustrated take on the narrow coverage of gay diversity by the MSM; a long conversation with a former atheist and now conservative Catholic over the spiritual crises of today’s America; a visual tribute to Alan Turing; the latest round of recommended reads from other substackers; a magical Mental Health Break; window views from Germany and Honduras and an uncaptioned one from … you take a guess, for the window contest. Subscribe for the full Dish experience!)
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New On The Dishcast: Michael Brendan Dougherty
Michael is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a prolific writer, primarily for National Review. His first book is My Father Left Me Ireland: An American Son’s Search for Home, a beautiful memoir I reviewed here.
For three clips of my conversation with Michael — on the countercultural rebellion of teen churchgoers; on the iconoclasm of the Great Awokening; and on a potential conflict with China strengthening U.S. liberalism — head over to our YouTube page. Listen to the whole episode here. (In the last 25 minutes we go into overtime mode by riffing on gay culture and Ptown.)
That episode link also takes you to another robust page of reader commentary on previous episodes, namely with evolutionary biologist Carole Hooven, open-borders booster Bryan Caplan, and liberal champion Jonathan Rauch. The podcast page has become a real vehicle for reader dialog. All thanks to Chris Bodenner, the guardian of Dishness.
The Actual Diversity Of The Gay World
Look at the teaser clip below from a new Netflix cartoon series, depicting a “Q-Force” of queer characters. It’s a cringe-fest of crude stereotypes and overly-sexualized minstrelsy — which is now presented as if it were somehow “progressive”:
It isn’t progressive. It’s deeply regressive.
(Read the whole post here, which includes a critical review of the NYT’s latest Pride coverage)
Dissents Of The Day: Enough With The CRT Already
Here’s one of many readers exasperated by the Dish’s continued focus on critical race theory:
One of the things I loved most about the Daily Dish was the wide-ranging nature of your ongoing discussion with the world. You have a capacious and free-roaming intellect, and it was always a joy to see where your curiosity would take you and your readers.
Not anymore. I realize the Weekly Dish, by its very nature, is more focused, with less space for interesting digressions than the old blog. But come on, man. It feels like every week, your newsletter contains little more than another grim screed about the totalitarian dangers of CRT.
Go here to read the rest of that dissent, and six other dissents, along with my lengthy response to them. As always, keep the criticism coming, along with anything else you want to add to the Dish mix, such as the view from your own window (if we post yours, we’ll give you a free subscription): dish@andrewsullivan.com.
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See you next Friday.
