Joe Biden and Catholicism in the United States
Massimo Faggioli, £18.99, 176 pages, Bayard
________
On paper, it looks like a takeover: not only is the new president Catholic (and rather devoutly so), but so are the Speaker of the House and six of the nine Supreme Court justices, including the chief justice. Imagine how alarmed an early twentieth-century Protestant politician would be, if he glimpsed these facts in a crystal ball. To calm him down, one would have to explain two things. First, the Church underwent a sort of liberal revolution in the mid-20th century, in which it dropped its old opposition to liberal democracy. Second, the Church then suffered an unofficial schism, which was especially strong in America, with the result that these politicians are so deeply at odds that they couldn’t take over a Sunday school. Massimo Faggioli gives a useful sketch of Biden’s faith but is mainly concerned to place him in the context of a dramatically divided Church. First he tells the stories of the three previous Catholic presidential candidates, all Democrats. When Al Smith ran against Herbert Hoover in 1928, he was hoping that America had moved on from its old anti-Catholic prejudice. It hadn’t: he was portrayed as the pope’s puppet and lost badly. Such prejudice was unsurprising: the papacy was still in full reactionary mode – not long before, in 1899, it had condemned “Americanism”.
