Maybe no other group in the United States struggled more with how to vote this past Presidential election than dedicated Catholics, or at least Catholics that had a strong distaste for Trump. Indeed, at least in states where the election was not close, and therefore a "wasted" vote on a third party candidate could be justified, quite a few opted this time, as with last, to vote for the candidates of the American Solidarity Party, the only party that they could vote for in such circumstances with a clear conscience. Indeed, some notable Catholics, and Orthodox, just flat out noted their support for the ASP irrespective of whether this state was close or not.
And on Twitter, in forms, and on Youtube debates raged. A Catholic Priest with a Vlog declared that Catholics couldn't vote for Democrats under any circumstance on pain of losing the soul. His Bishop stepped in to suggest that he was going too far, while a Bishop from Texas came in and praised him. Notable Catholics in the Ethersphere squared off against each other, with some such as Dawn Eden noting disapproval of Trump and getting rebuked by other Catholics including at least one Priest. Bishops generally urged Catholics to consult voter guides put out by the American council of Catholic Bishops that urged their flocks to very seriously consider the moral implications of their votes, but nobody came right out and stated "vote for . . . "
Of course, some weren't troubled by such things at all. Some people felt clarity in their decisions. Once such person I know noted that it didn't matter how much he might fight Trump personally distasteful, he was going to vote for him no matter what due to his position on abortion.
And through it all, we'd note the the following. Donald Trump is a Presbyterian, but one whose personal behavior in the past would have caused John Calvin to lecture him from the pulpit. Mike Pence is an Evangelical Christian, but one who is a fallen away Catholic, something rarely mentioned. Joe Biden, however, is a Mass attending Catholic. Kamala Harris is a Protestant Christian, but not one of a denomination that I'm familiar with.
I don't know about Harris, but its interesting to note that of the collection of these candidates, Biden is the most personally observant, followed by Pence. Trump is the least. As noted, I don't know about Harris.
That doesn't actually answer any questions, however, as we'll note below. And it didn't work the same way it did with the last Catholic President, and the only other one, John F. Kennedy, who was a Mass attending President, but personally very unobservant, which people didn't know. Catholics in the 1960 election could go and and vote for him simply because he was a Catholic, if they the voter, was Catholic. Observant Catholics familiar with Biden's voting record couldn't do that, and indeed many felt they had to do the opposite. Probably, therefore, nobody voted for Biden because he was a Catholic. Many observant Catholics did the opposite.
In spite of all of that, it was inevitable that when Joseph Robinette Biden was elected President that his Catholic faith would soon be mentioned, and, additionally, reference would soon be made to the only other Catholic President the nation has ever had, John Fitzgerald Kennedy.
John F. Kennedy. Presented as a young, vibrant, World War Two veteran of Irish Catholic background, Kennedy in fact was in extremely poor health and taking drugs that would preclude anyone from occupying the office. He also had the sexual morals of an alley cat and was generally a pretty bad President. No matter, his false image is still idolized.
Now, this is yet another one of the numerous posts here that should proceed with a cautionary tale first being introduced. It's not safe to assume that the comments here indicate how a person voted. You can assume that votes were cast, but you shouldn't assume they were cast for Donald Trump. . . or Joe Biden. . . or whomever.
Indeed, one of the features of rationality is to be able to hold two thoughts. . . or more in your head at the same time. And the fact that the majority of human beings do not use logic, but emotion, for decisions, makes those who use logic subject to all sorts of abuse and misunderstanding.
The Presidency of Donald Trump was virtually a feast/torture for conservatives of logical thought. Personally he was often detestable, but he also opposed abortion and appointed excellent Supreme Court nominees of the type Conservatives only dreamed of before. We're unlikely to see either of those things out of Joe Biden, while at the same time he's likely to be much more personable and therefore tolerable in polite society. Cynics are very much able to make the comment here that it seems people prefer presentation over effect.
Which brings us back to our main theme.
There's something going on in the Catholic world which is easy for those in the US to miss, but it's a big deal.
The Catholic Church is by far the largest Christian denomination in the world, and its growing like crazy. It's far bigger than any Protestant denomination, and the American assumption to the contrary. Indeed, the novelty of Biden being only the second Catholic to be voted into the Oval Office is likely to really cease being novel quickly, as Catholics are set to make up the majority of the American population in really short order.
Indeed, the thing going on in the Catholic faith had a role in this election. We'll get to that thing in a moment, but one of the things that took pollsters way off guard is that the Latino vote has started to swing Republican, and not just in the Cuban American camp. That was predicted here, but arrived much more quickly than we expected.
The thing, if you will, going on in the Catholic, and indeed Apostolic, world is that the generation of Church leadership that emerged from Vatican II and which took the Church in many places far to the "left" is dying off and retiring. As it does, younger Catholics and Apostolic Christians are coming into their own. They're highly educated in their Faith, and they're highly orthodox.
Which gives them the problem of Joseph R. Biden.
The Press, remaining largely non Catholic and secular, doesn't really grasp this at all. To them, Biden is a Catholic. But to some younger Catholics that's so debatable that there's those who will dispute even that. That being said, Biden is very clearly a Catholic that's way outside of orthodox thought in his public life. Indeed, so much so that younger and older orthodox Catholics would generally regarded him as a very bad Catholic generally and one whose soul is in danger.
The press version of Biden's religion is the charming Irish American one that was told for Kennedy as well, but more so. Biden was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania to an "Irish Catholic family". Like a lot of American Catholics whose family roots stem back some time, in reality he's of mixed heritage, but Catholic heritage, descending from Irish, English and French roots.
Indeed his middle name, Robinette, was the last name of his mother, and is a French Canadian name. The French version of the same name is generally Robinet, the difference in spellings being due to the Quebecois pronunciation of the name which pronounces the "t" at the end of the word. The meaning of the name seems to be diminutive of the name Robert. Biden, on the other hand, is a Saxon name meaning a button maker.
This background frankly fits the common American Catholic background more than the media version in which everyone grew up in tweeds eating Corned Beef. Indeed, its somewhat reflective of my own background, which also includes French via Quebec and English, along with Irish.
Biden was born in 1942 so he's a post Great Depression, and more or less post World War Two American Catholic. That means he was born into an era in which to be Catholic didn't mean that you were limited in occupation, as it had been basically up until 1945. It also meant that he grew up in the Latin Rite at a time it still used Latin, but he was a young man during Vatican II. It also, more broadly, means he experienced, as a young man, the campaign of John F. Kennedy and the turbulent 1960s, both of which seem to have been hugely formative in his political views.
John F. Kennedy was portrayed as an Irish American Catholic during his 1960 campaign for the Presidency. And indeed, JFK was an Irish American, although one of very different background than most. As hinted at above, and as addressed elsewhere, it was only after 1945 that Catholics of any stripe really could hope for a university education, with some exceptions, and most took blue collar jobs. The post war GI Bill changed all that rapidly. But JFK himself had grown up in the prewar world when that had been true, but it certainly hadn't been true of his upbringing. He was different right from the onset.
Irish Americans didn't see it that way, however, and neither did the Irish themselves, as one of the blogs we link in here on our feed recently noted. As Mark Holan's Irish American Blog notes, the Irish intensely followed JFK's campaign and election in 1960. The whole world has been watching the American election of 2020, but not because Joe Biden professes Catholicism or because he has Irish heritage. Indeed, we've had another President, Ronald Reagan, who claimed the latter since then, although again how perfectly is a very large question.
In 1960 when JFK was running Irish Americans and other Catholic Americans were in new white collar jobs largely for the first time and also were, in urban areas, moving out of the "Catholic Ghetto". They still were regarded with suspicion by a lot of Protestant Americans however. JFK faced that in his election campaign of that year and the memory of Al Smith, the prior major Catholic contender for the Oval Office, remained strong. Smith has been widely regarded as having lost the 1928 Presidential election as he was Catholic, and his religion was an open topic during the race.
Portrait of Al Smith as the Governor of New York.
Smith had addressed the religious issue he was presented with by declaring that he didn't want people to vote for him because he was Catholic, and people who would vote against him for that reason weren't acting as Americans ought to and he didn't want their votes either. Kennedy, however, basically took the view that he was a Catholic only on Sunday.
We've addressed that before, but during his 1960 campaign Kennedy pretty much disavowed that his religion was anything more than a Sunday thing at a Baptist convention. This satisfied worried Protestants who had an irrational fear of Papal control over the Oval Office, but it was gigantically destructive to American Catholicism.
Kennedy's views were rapidly adopted by American Catholics who too wanted to be seen as American first and Catholic second, something that's not really possible for adherent Catholics to do. This didn't present an immediate problem but it soon would. The Second Vatican Council was held from 1962 to 1965 to address problems that seemed to have come about due to World War One and World War Two and it introduced reforms into the Church and were associated, inaccurately, with reforms that were otherwise coming about. Some of these were relatively minor, but by the 1970s, the "Spirit of Vatican II" was running amuck in the United States and changing everything from the language of the Mass to church architecture. In 1968 the Pope issued
Humanae Vitae, now largely seen as prophetic, which addressed artificial birth control, something running contrary to the Sexual Revolution which was then in full swing, but also a few years behind the introduction of artificial birth control. 1968, at the same time, saw massive social disruption on a global scale and, in some significant ways, ended the political order that had prevailed since 1945.
The net result was that in the United States the Church was enduring change everywhere, with it being everything from architecture to the views of younger Priest just coming in.
Well that era is over.
As addressed in a recent episode of Catholic Stuff You Should Know, younger Catholics have taken back orthodoxy and re reintroducing it back into the Catholic mainstream. These Catholics aren't your great grandparents by any means, they're smarter and better educated in their Faith. They also definitely aren't operating with the Spirit of Vatican II. And they're not "cultural" Catholics.
And that's why candidates like Biden are a modern problem for Catholics. More than Kennedy was to Catholics of his era.
Catholics didn't really know much about what Kennedy really thought. We now know that he thought a lot about screwing every young woman who crossed his path. We also know now that his blundering was complicit in the murder of a foreign head of state. He had the morals of an alley cat sexually and was a rotten President otherwise.*
Not somebody to emulate.
And neither is Joe Biden for orthodox Catholics, although he's certainly not personally immoral like Kennedy was. Rather, it's his political stands on some matters that are hugely problematic for Catholics.
Biden came up in the political era in which, as we've noted, Catholic politicians were allowed to be claimed to be that and pretty much ignore their Faith as long as they went to Mass on Sunday. It didn't happen all at once. Ted Kennedy, for example, was an opponent of abortion. But by the 1980s it was in full bloom and the "I personally believe, but" Catholic politician became the Boomer rule. An example of that is Biden, and another Nancy Pelosi. They both freely vote for and even implicitly support matters which Catholic orthodox thought hold to be impermissible. Indeed, so much so that doing it may perhaps be regarded, if done knowingly and with appreciation of the gravity, that it may be a mortal sin. Not only that, but full absolution for it would not only take Confession, something that would be all that most run of the mill Catholics would have to do, but actually repenting of it through affirmative acts to address the harm caused by your prior acts.
Within a decade it will start to be the case that Catholic politicians who take this approach are going to be denied the sacraments and this is in fact already happening in some places. But the damage done by Kennedy and his followers has been vast. Vast, but not irreparable.
For the time being, however, the 2020 election provided a real struggle for Catholics. Many found Trump deeply repellant for a variety of reasons, but for largescale deeply held moral reasons, he was the choice they'd otherwise be inclined to follow. He has been opposed to abortion. He had not held to the "progressive" view that gender is merely a matter of choice. He has withdrawn American servicemen from contested areas around the globe and not become involved in new wars, something that Catholic theology holds to be problematic. Seeking to define him in relation to moral issues, some went so far as to compare him to Cyrus the Great, the Persian Emperor who definitely wasn't Jewish but who took actions that favored the Jews. Such a comparison is a stretch of course, but trying to figure out how to handle a personally repugnant, to some, person who does morally laudable things, has been a struggle for many.
What is certain is that Trump's views anticipated those that are coming, as we've already addressed, while his personal behavior was often repellant. At the same time, the old Boomer Catholics are often seemingly comfortable in their mental ambiguity and JFK "went to Mass on Sunday" views and seemingly certain in the belief that those views will prevail in the Church, and outside, going forward. That's not going to be the case.
And in the meantime, we have Joe Biden, who will be the last of the Boomer/Pre Boomer Presidents. For Catholics, he's the second co-religious in U.S. history, a second of questionable significance at this time, but may be retrospectively or, should he adhere to the tenants of his Faith, will be this term, a term which is probably the only one he'll serve.
One thing, however, that has developed in the short term. Catholics who didn't like Trump due to his character and agonized over their vote and then went for Biden have had their choice more or less ratified by Trump's post election conduct. At the time this was being typed out Trump was still attempting to prosecute efforts to have courts stop vote counting or otherwise challenge votes. The Secretary of State of Georgia, a Republican, has claimed that Trump backer Lindsey Graham pressured him regarding votes in some Georgia counties. Trump is still asserting the election was corrupt with nothing to back him up, meaning of course that he's advancing lies against his opponent and against democracy itself. The overall look for those who worried about Trump's character has verified their actions.
For a vote that seems to be developing and coalescing in the future that will leave the GOP with a lot of near term damage to repair.
*I realize that, in spite of all the evidence supporting this, there's a lot of people who simply can't accept this view of Kennedy and regard him, and indeed the entire Kennedy family as some sort of benighted heroic clan. Well, so be it. They aren't, and never were.
