In Defying the Odds, we discuss the 2016 campaign. The 2019 update includes a chapter on the 2018 midterms. The 2020 race, the subject of our next book, is well underway.
When Pope Francis visited the United States in 2015, his welcomer-in-chief was then-Vice President Joe Biden.
Almost wherever Francis went, Biden was there — in the White House and the Capitol, and also in sacred spaces, including at Mass at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. Biden followed the pope from Washington to Philadelphia, leading a farewell ceremony for the visiting dignitary he has called “the single most popular figure in the world.”
This week, President Trump painted a very different picture of Biden, mocking his presumptive Democratic opponent as a man hostile to religion. “Take away your guns, take away your Second Amendment. No religion, no anything,” Trump said of Biden on Thursday. “Hurt the Bible. Hurt God. He’s against God. He’s against guns. He’s against energy, our kind of energy.”
...In 2011, George P. Matysek Jr. wrote at The Narthex:
Others noted that Biden almost always has rosary beads in his pocket, and frequently holds them in his hand — including while he monitored the raid that killed Osama Bin Laden in 2011. He has written and spoken at length of how faith helped him grieve the loss of his first wife and daughter many years ago, and his son Beau more recently.
The New York Times is reporting that as U.S. military forces began their mission to kill or capture Osama bin Laden May 1, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. “fingered his rosary beads” in the Situation Room of the White House.Patrick Crowley, Cincinnati Enquirer, October 23, 2005:
It’s not the first time we have heard about Biden’s rosary. An Irish Catholic from Scranton, the vice president carries his rosary with him. It is said that when he underwent brain surgery, he asked doctors if he could keep a rosary under his pillow.
Biden said that if he runs for president, he intends to aggressively defend his own values as well as those of the Democratic Party.
"If I'm the nominee, Republicans will be sorry," he said. "The next Republican that tells me I'm not religious I'm going to shove my rosary beads down their throat.
"I am so sick and tired of this pontificating about us not being the party of faith," said Biden, a Roman Catholic who has served in the Senate since the Nixon administration.
