Joe Biden's Presidency Has Highlighted the Rifts in the American Catholic Church - TIME
The hymns of the Catholic Church have been the soundtrack to Joe Biden’s life. He attends Mass on Sundays and holy days, and before major events. In Oval Office meetings, Biden sometimes pulls from his pocket a string of rosary beads that belonged to his late son Beau; in quieter moments, Biden will walk his fingers down the beads while saying the holy rosary, a series of meditative prayers. The day the 2020 election was called for Biden, just before he and his family greeted a cheering crowd in Wilmington, Del., a Catholic priest was asked to call in over Zoom to pray with the President-elect and his family. They bowed their heads to the prayer of St. Francis: “Lord, make me an instrument of your peace; where there is hatred, let me sow love.”
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Biden’s election comes at a complicated moment for the Catholic Church in America, which continues to reckon with a sexual-abuse scandal (and subsequent cover-up) that has caused widespread disenchantment with the institution. On one hand, Biden’s ascension is a capstone of the faith’s march to political acceptance. The nation’s second Catholic President oversees a government with unprecedented representation for the church. Six of nine Supreme Court Justices are Catholic, as well as the Speaker of the House, at least eight Cabinet secretaries and multiple other members of the Administration. One-fifth of all votes in the 2020 election were cast by Catholics, roughly half of them for Biden.
While Biden campaigned on some key policies the church favors—including advancing racial justice, ending the death penalty, addressing climate change and aiding refugees—he also advocates policies out of step with Catholic doctrine, such as expanding access to reproductive health care and increasing gay and transgender rights. For many top bishops and conservative voters, Biden embodies a more liberal version of the faith that poses a threat to the future of the church in America. His election “exposes a divide among American Catholics that’s been there for a long time,” says Maureen O’Connell, a religion professor at La Salle University. “There’s a big chasm, a growing chasm.”
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Biden and other prominent Catholic Democrats have long sought to thread the needle. In 1984, New York Governor Mario Cuomo was one of the first major Catholic politicians to argue he could be personally against abortion while working politically to uphold the right to the procedure enshrined in Roe v. Wade. Like Cuomo, Biden says his personal beliefs are consistent with church teachings, but he can’t support policies that would force those beliefs on others.
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As President, Biden’s personal faith plays out in public ways. Rather than downplaying his religion, as Kennedy did, he has lived it publicly. A framed photo of Biden shaking hands with Pope Francis rests on the table over Biden’s left shoulder as he sits at the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office. In his speeches, he quotes from the Bible and invokes Catholic saints and philosophers. He made the sign of the cross at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier when he visited after his Inauguration.
When Biden is home in Wilmington, his longtime aide and confidant, former Senator Ted Kaufman, often joins him for Mass at his home church, St. Joseph on the Brandywine. Biden’s faith, Kaufman says, has not only helped him through the tragedies of losing his first wife and daughter in a car crash and his son Beau to cancer. It has also steeled him against the criticism of his faith leveled by fellow Catholics. “The attacks on him that he’s not doing God’s will, they bounce off him. This has been going on for a long time,” says Kaufman. “He knows who he is. He knows what he believes.”
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https://time.com/5951502/joe-biden-catholic-church/
= new reply since forum marked as read
Which is, of course, abortion, hate Biden, even though his Catholicism is a huge part of his life.
I know, my sister is one.
Yet they voted in the most morally vacant guy on the planet four years ago .... 
