Joe Biden says his Catholicism a ‘private matter’ but it is a big part of his political ideology

It has already been visited by two popes, two saints and, soon, a US president.

The White House confirmed late on Monday that President Joseph Biden would visit the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Knock, better known as the Knock Shrine, during his trip to Co Mayo later this week.

Pope St John Paul II was there in 1979 to mark the centenary of the Virgin Mary’s appearance in 1879. Mother Teresa, now also a saint, was there in 1993. Pope Francis visited in August 2018.

On Friday, the shrine will have another high-profile visitor in Biden, just the second Catholic to be elected US president. The first was John F Kennedy, elected in 1960, who visited Ireland 60 years ago.

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Even that visionary Mayo man Msgr James Horan, parish priest of Knock from 1967 to 1986, could hardly have foreseen where his handiwork might lead. He not alone built the Basilica at Knock shrine but also its international airport on “a foggy, boggy” site nearby at Barnacuigev in the grim 1980s.

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This latter “miracle” at least was rooted in a wily pragmatism. As the monsignor once told the late Jim Dunne, formerly of this parish, “How else could I get £10 million for infrastructural spending from central government into Mayo?” The politicians, he said, “wanted something really eye-catching that would get their names in the paper”.

Biden has been described as the most overtly religious US president in more than 40 years, since Jimmy Carter. Biden attends weekly Mass and keeps a picture of Pope Francis in the Oval Office. Yet, for him, faith is “a private matter”. As it is for many Irish Catholics among the 66.4 per cent who voted to repeal the Eighth Amendment in 2018. While he does not agree with abortion personally, he is pro-choice.

This is not enough for the more ideological Catholics in the US or that country’s bishops, of whom the more conservative believe the president should be refused Communion for his pro-choice views. It is not a view shared by Pope Francis who, in September 2021, said “I have never refused the Eucharist to anyone.”

Speaking on a flight back to Rome, after visits to Hungary and Slovakia, when asked about the US debate on refusing Communion to Biden, the Pope told reporters that bishops should be pastors, not politicians.

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“What must the pastor do?” he asked. “Be a pastor, don’t go condemning. Be a pastor, because he is a pastor also for the excommunicated.”

Communion, he said was “not a prize for the perfect”. It was “a gift, the presence of Jesus and his church”, he said, adding that bishops should use “compassion and tenderness” with Catholic politicians who support abortion rights.

Then, lest there be any doubt, he said “abortion is homicide” and that “whoever has an abortion kills. It is a human life… This human life must be respected – this principle is so clear.”

The following month, Biden visited Rome, three days before the US supreme court overturned Roe vs Wade which had legalised abortion throughout the US. He called to see Pope Francis. Asked afterwards if the topic of abortion came up, the US president said: “No it didn’t – we just talked about the fact he was happy that I was a good Catholic and I should keep receiving Communion.”

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A day after meeting Pope Francis, Biden received Communion at Mass in St Patrick’s Church, Rome. Founded by Irish Augustinians, it is near the US embassy and, of course, in the diocese of which Pope Francis is bishop. St Patrick’s has also been the titular church in Rome for three Irish cardinals and Catholic archbishops of Armagh – Cahal Daly, William Conway and Tomás Ó Fiaich.

In the US, Catholics are the largest Christian denomination and make up over a fifth of the population, at about 72 million people or an estimated 22 per cent. Latinos make up almost 40 per cent of those and are predominantly Democrat. White Catholics make up the rest and are believed to be evenly divided between Republicans and Democrat supporters, while it has been claimed that it was white Catholic pro-life women who secured the White House for Donald Trump.

In general, however, the US, that most Protestant country, has moved quite a distance where Catholicism is concerned. Democrat Albert Smith – the first Catholic to win nomination for the presidency – lost the 1928 presidential election because of fears he would take direction from the pope.

This subject was famously addressed directly by John F Kennedy in September 1960 when he told the Greater Houston Ministerial Association during his presidential campaign: “I am not the Catholic candidate for president. I am the Democratic Party’s candidate for president who also happens to be a Catholic. I do not speak for my church on public matters – and the church does not speak for me.”

Despite this, he still took a hammering in the more Protestant states. They favoured Richard Nixon, who hailed from an Irish Quaker background in Co Laois.

Biden’s Irish Catholicism is a key part of his ancestral and political make-up, a fact made clear from the itinerary of his Irish visit this week.

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On Friday, Biden’s visit to the Knock Shrine will the first engagement of the final day of his four-day visit.

Fr Richard Gibbons, parish priest and rector of Knock Shrine, said Biden’s stop-off would “probably be the most private element of his visit to Ireland”. The priest said that because of the US president’s “commitment to his faith”, he wanted stop off at Knock and “say a private prayer”.

Biden will be gifted a stone from the gable wall of the Knock chapel where the apparition of Mary occurred in 1879, Fr Gibbons said.

The final engagement of Biden’s trip will be Friday evening’s public address in front of St Muredach’s Cathedral, the cathedral church of the Catholic Diocese of Killala, a church his ancestor Edward Blewitt sold 27,000 bricks to in the 1820s that helped fund the cost of his emigration to the US in 1851.

Blewitt’s great-great-great-grandson was elected US president 169 years later.