Joe Biden’s very public clash with his own church

As a rule dating back to the election, the reporters who follow the president go everywhere with him but two places: inside his home and inside his church.

When Joe Biden goes to Mass at his home parish in Delaware, the press observes from a designated area on the edge of the property, 50 yards away. Peering through the bars of a black wrought-iron fence, they can see the small parking lot where his motorcade arrives — state troopers first, then the black SUVs. Anyone who strays from the spot is met with surprising speed and firmness by a member of the parish and directed to please return to the perimeter.

The trips to St. Joseph on the Brandywine, the pale-yellow church where Biden has worshiped for decades, are recorded in spare pool reports from the press like this one on a Saturday in the dead of mid-July. “POTUS left residence at 4:09 p.m. Motorcade is rolling.”

The trips to St. Joseph on the Brandywine, the pale-yellow church where Biden has worshiped for decades, are recorded in spare pool reports from the press like this one on a Saturday in the dead of mid-July. “POTUS left residence at 4:09 p.m. Motorcade is rolling.”

The reports omit the anodyne details of the motorcade’s arrival: how the car doors open, and Secret Service agents spill out, fanning out across the lawn; how he emerges from a darkened backseat, always a few minutes after service begins; how he ducks inside, slipping out of view into a pew near the back without disturbing the congregation. The whole thing happens in 45 seconds. In pictures, the president is always either entering or leaving, viewed from a distance: now in snow, now in sun, now in rain; in a navy suit, a brown sport coat, a blue button-down, shirt sleeves rolled up, sometimes down, aviators, no aviators, masked, maskless. Stack the images together, and you see one endless solitary — and silent — walk to attend Mass.

“POTUS arrived at St. Joseph on the Brandywine at 4:12 p.m.”

But if you had been standing outside the church when Biden’s car door swung open on this particular Saturday afternoon, you would have heard the shouting. You would have seen Moira Sheridan and David Williams outside the church gates, carrying faded posterboard signs. Both from Wilmington, both in their late 60s, both Catholics, they are a familiar presence at St. Joseph — they have come at least 20 times since the general election — though they rarely make the pool reports.

Williams wore a newsboy hat. “Number one, our concern is for Joe Biden’s soul,” Sheridan told me. They had not come to pray for the president, who is only the second occupant of the White House to share their faith. They had come to block him from participating in the church’s most important sacrament. It is their belief that if Biden is going to receive communion, “then we don’t want him comfortably going in,” said Williams. And it is uncomfortable. Last fall, before the election, steps from the Biden family graves behind the church, someone in their small group called out, “Repent for Beau’s soul.”

As they see it, church doctrine demands that Biden be made an example of, called out even when visiting his son’s final resting place. “He’s the most public figure in the world,” Sheridan said. “What he does affects what other Catholics will do. There is no such thing as mainstream, there is no such thing as extreme, and there is no such thing as liberal — there is Catholic.”

Joe Biden, the nation’s first Catholic president in more than 60 years, grew up hearing that John F. Kennedy could never win. When he was a young senator, it was anti-Catholic hate mail that showed up at the house in Delaware. When he ran for president at age 77, on the eve of his election, he said he still had “a chip” on his shoulder, “coming from an Irish Catholic neighborhood where it wasn’t viewed as being such a great thing.” He is a president who built his life in politics around the idea of faith, not in some vague way, but in a specifically Catholic way. When he explains himself to the world, it is through Catholic social doctrine and the Catholic institutions he loved: the nuns, the schools, the culture. And yet he has arrived in the White House to discover that he is viewed suspiciously not by non-Catholics for being too Catholic, but rather by members of his own faith for not being Catholic enough. It was his position on abortion — and his decision in the Democratic primary to finally oppose the Hyde Amendment, the measure banning public funding for most abortions, the one thing he resisted for decades — that helped him win the White House after three decades and three presidential campaigns, but immediately made him a target of his own church.

If it is at all jarring to hear two strangers speaking authoritatively about a president’s soul, you can find reams of discussion about it on Catholic Reddit, or on the more sympathetic Catholic Twitter, or in incremental coverage by the Catholic media, a lively ecosystem of left-wing and right-wing outlets, where bishops are always popping up in the news to chide Biden, attack Biden or defend Biden. When Biden chose Kamala Harris as his running mate, the Bishop of Providence tweeted that it would be the first time in a while that “a Democratic ticket hasn’t had a Catholic on it. Sad.” In February, Archbishop Joseph F. Naumann of Kansas City said the president needed to “stop defining himself as a devout Catholic” and “acknowledge that his view on abortion is contrary to Catholic moral teaching.” Biden, he said, “should know that after 78 years as a Catholic.” In April, Cardinal Raymond Burke, a leading critic of Pope Francis, called Biden an “apostate.”

Then came the most public rebuke of all. This June, in a stunning open debate, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, the collection of bishops and cardinals that make up the church’s U.S. hierarchy, weighed moving forward with a document providing justification for denying pro-choice politicians from taking communion, the spiritual heart of Catholicism and the fundamental ritual of the faith. The conference, which will continue the debate at its next meeting in November, has labeled his presidency a “difficult and complex situation.”

Ask Biden about this and he will have little to say. “That’s a private matter,” he told a reporter in June. “That is just my personal life…”

If it’s personal, it certainly isn’t private. It is a debate in full public view, a collision of religion and politics never seen in the American presidency — with a clash between his stance on abortion and church dogma now unavoidable. The Supreme Court’s decision this week to allow a highly restrictive Texas abortion law to take effect — and Biden’s public statement that the law “blatantly violates the constitutional right established under Roe v. Wade” — has put the country’s most polarizing social issue once again at the center of American politics. Biden may soon find that the line he’s walked over four decades of public life — as a politician of ostentatious faithfulness who also insists his faith is a private matter — is no longer available to him.

Questions about the issue tend to grate on the White House. At a press briefing last week, Owen Jensen, a reporter from EWTN, a conservative Catholic news outlet, was loudly trying to ask a question about Biden’s faith. It wasn’t the first time he’d sparred with press secretary Jen Psaki, who turned toward the interruption with a flash of annoyance. “Why does the president support abortion,” Jensen shouted, “when his own Catholic faith teaches abortion is morally wrong?”

“I know you’ve never faced those choices,” Psaki shot back, “nor have you ever been pregnant, but for women out there who have faced those choices, this is an incredibly difficult thing. … The president believes that right should be respected.” At St. Joseph’s, Biden emerged from the car dressed in light blue shirt sleeves and walked the familiar path through the graveyard that surrounds the church, within view of the place where he buried his wife, his daughter, his father, his mother, and his son. The shouting accompanied him to the front door. “Joe Biden is a fake catholic!  Joe Biden commits sacrilege against the lord when he receives holy communion.  Joe Biden is a fake catholic…!” The president kept moving, eyes forward, his face inscrutable.

* Ruby Cramer is a senior staff writer for Politico Magazine