WASHINGTON (RNS) — When President Joe Biden took the oath of office on Wednesday (Jan. 20), he became only the second Catholic president in U.S. history.
But when he marched off the Capitol grounds later in the day, he reentered a much larger group: a peculiar, hyperpolitical faith community that makes the nation’s capital one of the most active and ardent Catholic centers.
Those believers who live in what locals call “the District” are a complex, multilayered web of cardinals and other churchmen, politicians, professors and everyday Catholics who also happen to regularly rub elbows with the most powerful people on the planet. It’s a community Biden has known for decades, but one that already looks markedly different from when he left the vice president’s official home, Number One Observatory Circle, to return to his home state of Delaware just four years ago.