(RNS) At 161 smallish pages, “Joe Biden and Catholicism in the United States” has the brevity, bravado and binary thinking of a good political tract. Which, in fact, is what it is. The handsome cover photo of Biden is campaign quality, and the opening declaration is boldly over the top.
The election of Biden as the second Catholic president of the United States, writes Massimo Faggioli, “alone made the 2020 U.S. election historically notable, distinctive in both the political and religious history of the United States.”
That distinction may more properly belong to the 2004 election, when a majority of Catholic voters did not prefer the Catholic candidate for president. The rejection of John Kerry, the second Irish-Catholic senator from Massachusetts to run for the office, put a firm closing parenthesis around the time when politicos spoke assuredly about something called “the Catholic vote.”
(RNS) For a decade, Massimo Faggioli has taught a class on U.S. Catholics and politics, most recently at Villanova University where he is a professor of theology and religious studies. But when it started to look increasingly likely that Joe Biden would become the Democratic nominee, Faggioli began to consider how this time in history is a particularly fraught one for a second Catholic U.S. president.
Out of that thinking grew his new book, “Joe Biden and Catholicism in the United States,” published on Inauguration Day.
The book names four U.S. Catholics who have run for president (Al Smith, John F. Kennedy, John Kerry and Biden) and includes a fifth who may be better known than any of these real-life examples: Jed Bartlet, played by Martin Sheen in the 1999-2006 hit TV series “The West Wing.”