Joe Biden is a Catholic.
This is a statement of fact, because of his baptism. Vice President Mike Pence is a Catholic, too, by the way. Each man — as is the case with all Catholics — is one Rite of Confession away from full participation in the sacraments of his church. What is Biden’s status? That’s between Biden and his confessor.
Now we get to the tricky question, during an election campaign in which — as always seems to be the case — Mass-attending Catholics are the crucial swing vote across the Rust Belt.
What is the accurate adjective to put in front of “Catholic” in the following equation? Joe Biden is a ______ Catholic. This question was the hook for this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (click here to tune that in).
If you read the mainstream press, the operative words appears to be “devout.” See this typical overture for a recent USA Today piece: “Donald Trump claims Joe Biden is 'against God;' Biden calls attack 'shameful'.”
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump unleashed another strident attack on Joe Biden over religion … saying his Democratic opponent, a devout Catholic, is "against God" and even religion itself — comments Biden denounced as “shameful.”
“No religion, no anything," Trump told supporters at a brief airport rally in Cleveland as he visited Ohio for an economic speech. "Hurt the Bible, hurt God. He’s against God, he’s against guns, he’s against energy, our kind of energy.”
Biden, who has often talked about how his Catholic faith helped him survive the death of his first wife and their daughter in a 1972 car crash, described Trump as a hypocrite making a cynical appeal to religious conservatives.
Trump’s oh-so-typical blast makes zero sense and was similar to the old claims that President Barack Obama was not a Christian. Obama was, of course, active in the United Church of Christ, an oldline Protestant denomination that has long helped define the bleeding left edge of Christianity in America.
So, again: Joe Biden is a ______ Catholic and constantly talks about the role that his faith has played in his life. Has anyone spotted Biden’s chosen adjective? I have not.