Joe Biden, the Second Catholic President
The Political Scene | The New Yorker
The New Yorker
4.3 • 3.9K Ratings
🗓️ 1 February 2021
⏱️ 13 minutes
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Summary
Joe Biden is only the second Catholic out of forty-six Presidents. Paul Elie, a senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs, considers whether that faith may shape Biden’s policies or his leadership. Elie points out that, though prominent Catholics in government, such as William Barr or Amy Coney Barrett, are associated with groups that oppose modern reforms in the Church, Biden aligns with Pope Francis’s “openness, his informality, his flexibility, his confidence that Catholicism is relevant and lack of anxiety about its place in any culture war.” After decades of sex-abuse scandals in the Church, Elie believes that many Catholic voters “are yearning for some good news,” and that Biden, though not in the Church hierarchy, “suggest[s] that there is some moral authority left in this tradition.”
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| 0:44.0 | Things people love. |
| 0:47.5 | I'm Dorothy Wickendon. |
| 0:49.6 | On today's Politics and More podcast, David Remnick talks with Paul Eli, a senior fellow with the |
| 0:56.1 | Berkeley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs at Georgetown University. |
| 1:02.0 | They'll discuss how Joe Biden's Catholic faith may affect his presidency. |
| 1:08.9 | It comes as something of a surprise to remember that President Biden is only the second Catholic |
| 1:14.5 | to hold the office out of 46 people so far. |
| 1:17.9 | The first, of course, was John Kennedy. |
| 1:20.7 | And whether that has any significance to his policies or his leadership is a question that I |
| 1:25.4 | wanted to ask Paul Eli. |
| 1:29.1 | Paul writes for us frequently about the Catholic Church and issues of faith, and he's a senior fellow at Georgetown University's |
| 1:34.1 | Berkeley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs. Now, Paul, I think we're a long past time |
| 1:41.1 | when discrimination against Catholics was a real force in America. |
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