It's hard to go past the US presidential election for this week's red lines,

and it's shaping up to be the battle between the man who's, to all intents and purposes,

the official Catholic candidate, namely Donald Trump,

against the actual Catholic candidate Joe Biden.

I'm sorry, Fenton, I've borrowed your line from Saturday's Irish Times.

That's a compliment, anyway, but I think it is a remarkable turnaround, isn't it?

I mean, when the last major party candidate for the presidency, who was an Irish Catholic, was

running, John F. Kennedy, of course, he had to come out very strongly and sort of downplay his religion and say, look, I am not the Catholic

candidate for presidency. I'm the Democratic Party candidate for presidency. And here you have on

the one side, Joe Biden, who is actually more ostentatiously pious, I think, than Kennedy ever

was. But he's being opposed pretty much officially by the Catholic Church,

by Cardinal Dolan of New York, who has very strongly endorsed Trump.

And it's not just that, but it's that, you know,

Trump has made an alliance with conservative Catholicism

that could shape not so much the election itself, but the disputing of the election through the Supreme Court.

Marian, what do you make of it?

You know, as Fenton said, it is an astonishing turnaround that the Catholics are so decisive. I think it's a mixture of where they're located in the Rust Belt and overwhelmingly in the swing states that are going to decide this election. But I think there's also a really interesting schism within the Catholic Church itself in America where you have, as Fenton said, people

like Archbishop Timothy Dolan, who would be very much Catholics in the Bill Barr School of

Catholicism. And then you have the other American Catholic bishops who would be much more about

social justice and would be probably very anti-Trump, but they're much less vocal

than bishops like Timothy Dolan.

And we can tease that out a little bit later in the conversation, hopefully.

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