Breda O’Brien: Joe Biden is not a ‘seamless garment’ Catholic

In Arthur Schlesinger's 1980 biography of Robert Kennedy, he describes Lord Longford suggesting to Eunice Shriver, Kennedy's sister, that a book should be written about John F Kennedy and his faith. Shriver allegedly replies that "it will be an awfully slim volume".

Even so, it was considered a major breakthrough when JFK became the first Catholic president. He achieved this by reassuring voters that it was safe to have a Catholic about the place.

In 1960 Kennedy told the Greater Houston Ministerial Association, a group of mostly Protestant ministers, that he believed in "a president whose religious views are his own private affair". He went on to say: "For contrary to common newspaper usage, I am not the Catholic candidate for president. I am the Democratic Party's candidate for president, who happens also to be a Catholic. I do not speak for my church on public matters, and the church does not speak for me."

This confirmed the idea that religion was something private, not something that should permeate every aspect of someone’s life. Obviously, no one should impose religious belief on anyone, but when it comes to major ethical issues such as the right to life, how can such views be purely private? For example, if someone believes privately that poverty ruins people’s lives, there is a word for people who would not strive to see that belief shape public policy.

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The idea that the ethical commitments of religious people are somehow suspect is pernicious. Was William Wilberforce’s abolitionism suspect? Martin Luther King’s anti-racism? Even though both their positions were grounded on their faith?

There is a legitimate kind of separation of church and state. It was originally envisaged, as Kennedy also pointed out in the same speech, as a means of protecting the freedom of religious people. When it works well, it allows people of differing beliefs to co-exist peacefully.

Tour de force

Politically, Kennedy's speech was a tour de force. However, it entrenched a position that has continued to dominate right up to the election of Joe Biden. In order to be an acceptable Catholic candidate, your views must not offend against the commandments of the political party. Sure, the dogma [beliefs that members of a faith are required to accept] can live loudly within you, but only if it is indistinguishable from the dogma of the party.

You cannot claim to be pro-life if you do not care about poverty, or support the death penalty

The views of the candidate can move the party to the left or right of the current consensus but they certainly cannot challenge it on any of the political articles of faith. Biden, who unlike Kennedy made his faith a centrepiece of his political campaigning, does not dissent in any meaningful way from the doctrines of the Democratic Party.

This is not to suggest that Biden is not sincere in his Catholic religious belief or that he is not being truthful when he says that it inspires his desire to be of public service. It just means that we have not come as far as we like to think we have when it comes to tolerance of religious belief.

Biden is not, in a term popularised by Cardinal Joseph Bernardin in the early 1980s, a "seamless garment" Catholic. Taking the image of Christ's robe that he wore before his crucifixion, which was woven from a single piece without seams, Bernardin wove poverty, euthanasia, nuclear war, abortion and other life issues into a single "consistent ethic of life at every stage and in every circumstance".

Pro-life practice

In other words, you cannot claim to be pro-life if you do not care about poverty, or support the death penalty. You cannot claim to care about children if you are unwilling to protect them from the very first stage of their lives in their mother’s wombs. Bernadin’s views were controversial from the beginning because some people believed that it seemed to make all kinds of different moral issues equally important, a view that first Bernardin himself, and later the then Cardinal Ratzinger (who became Pope Benedict XVI in 2005) deplored. When used in a way that ascribes appropriate weight to certain vital issues such as the right to life, a consistent life ethic is central to Catholic teaching.

It is perfectly possible that Pope Francis will find Biden more congenial on a personal level than he found Donald Trump, and that he and President Biden will find much in common when it comes to immigrants or the environment.

It is just as likely that Pope Francis will also deliver reminders to President Biden not dissimilar to the ones issued around the time of the inauguration by Archbishop Jose Gomez on behalf of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. The archbishop praised "Mr Biden's piety and personal story" and "his longstanding commitment to the Gospel's priority for the poor" and declared he found them inspiring. He then criticised his equally longstanding pursuit of "certain policies that would advance moral evils and threaten human life and dignity".

The archbishop was simply continuing a long tradition of separation of church and state that allows churches, in the words of Dr Martin Luther King, to be neither "the master nor the servant of the state, but rather, the conscience of the state".