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Hello and welcome to the Americano podcast, a series of discussions about American power, politics and society.

On each episode, I will talk to an American expert or an expert on America

about something that's going on in America in 2023. I am delighted to be joined by Ed Condon,

who is the editor of The Pillar, which is a very interesting Catholic publication. And we're going to be

talking about Joe Biden, President Joe Biden's Catholicism. Ed, Joe Biden is the second

Catholic president. And Catholicism plays an important part of his life, as he tells it. He is a

practicing Catholic. Let's start by asking how do Catholics feel

about Joe Biden? How does the Catholic demographic of America think about him? Does it vote

from him? Does it support him? Does Catholicism play a part in the fact that they vote for him or not?

I think it'd be fair to say that how American Catholics react to Joe Biden's Catholicism is

pretty broadly reflective of how Joe Biden treats his own Catholicism, which is they break

pretty evenly. Half of American Catholics, I think more or less would say that Joe Biden is

no Catholic at all, at least in terms of how his faith informs or doesn't inform his political campaigns

and platforms. And the other half think that he's, you know, an outstanding and representative

member of their flock. I think Joe Biden is really very emblematic of a wider trend in American

Catholicism, which has emerged in the last couple of decades, in which I'd say a sizable portion,

if not a majority of American

Catholics, tend to view their faith through the prism of their politics rather than the

other way around.

And it's very much connected to Joe Biden's sense of his Irishness, isn't it?

And that is something a lot of Irish Americans, they identify as Catholics, whether or not

...