Biden is America’s most prominent Catholic. The church’s most conservative wish he wasn’t.

WASHINGTON – When President Joe Biden met Pope Francis at the Vatican on Friday, he presented the Pope with a 100-year-old hand-spun cloak from a church in the nation’s capital with a long history and a liberal bias.

But it wasn’t the priestly clothing that sent the strongest message. It was the box it came in, with a Bible verse that read in part: “… [f]forgive as the Lord has forgiven you. “

It could be viewed as an implied allusion to the struggle in which Biden, only the second Roman Catholic president elected in his homeland, is embroiled over the future of the faith to which he ascribes all of his life.

As the US Catholic Church seeks to gain a foothold after years of scandal and ever empty pews, a struggle between conservative and progressive wings reflecting bipartisan rifts across the country has emerged. Though most seem to agree that the battle is bigger than Biden, the president is at the center of what church historians call a turning point for his support for legal abortions – his church.

American bishops have suggested that Biden be denied communion, the fundamental element of belief in religion.

“Biden openly takes political positions that directly contradict the most basic doctrines of the Church,” said Ashley McGuire, senior fellow of the Conservative Catholic Association. “The church doesn’t really have a choice to be silent.”

In June, the US Bishops’ Conference dedicated its national meeting to discussing Biden and his public support for abortion law. The Catholic Church rejects abortion and teaches that life begins with conception. The sacrament of communion is at the heart of Catholic faith practice, evidence that they believe that Jesus was the Son of God and that the wine and bread are changed into his actual body and blood.

The bishops decided to draft a document giving advice to priests on what to do when abortion rights politicians show up in their churches. The bishops will meet again in November to revisit the issue and likely make formal recommendations.

The draft document that is in circulation does not name Biden, said a source who advised some of the bishops working on the document. The source asked for anonymity in order to speak openly about the deliberations of the bishops.

The document won’t instruct priests to refuse communion to anyone, but it will attempt to use Biden – or politicians like him – as an example of not practicing Catholicism, the source said.

Biden, who attended mass every weekend and made his faith a central part of his personal story, remained silent in the battle. He did not speak publicly at the bishops’ meeting or react when other prominent church leaders publicly criticized him, not even from the pulpit.

When asked on Friday whether Pope Francis, who was also the target of US bishops who see him as insufficiently conservative and even illegitimate, had told him to continue receiving communion, Biden simply replied: “Yes”.

“If Joe Biden is excluded from communion, it would be another step in the escalation of bipartisanism that is currently incredibly visible in the Catholic Church in this country,” said Massimo Faggioli, professor of theology at Villanova University. “So you are not saying this to help Biden, but to help Catholicism not fall into the trap of sectarianism.”

The election of Biden to the White House would, for an outsider, have been a crowning achievement of the integration of American Catholics into the fabric of the nation. But not for the conservatives of the church.

“He’s a very confusing figure for American Catholics because he’s been very committed to his faith and Catholicism while openly disregarding Church doctrine,” said McGuire of Biden.

When John F. Kennedy was elected the first Catholic President, Catholicism was considered a foreign religion, and an American head of state threatened to be controlled by a foreign pope. The year Kennedy took office, Biden graduated from a Catholic high school in Wilmington, Delaware, a city with many Irish, Italian, and Polish Catholics who were likely delighted to see one of their own in the Oval Office.

By 2020, Biden’s belief was no longer considered alien and was essentially not an election issue. And he’s hardly alone in Washington: House spokeswoman Nancy Pelosi is also Catholic, as is almost a third of Congress and two-thirds of the Supreme Court, including Conservative Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, who openly comment on theirs Faith spoke their confirmation negotiations.

“Joe Biden’s life has essentially spanned this period of church history in America, from a time when the Church was very united, very faithful, seminaries were brimming with new priests, the Catholic churches were full, to today there are church amalgamations , Church closings, seminars being emptied, all these kinds of problems. ”That said Brian Burch, President of CatholicVote.org.

That Biden should now be used to show Catholics how not to practice Catholicism was a refrain for those in favor of exclusion from communion, as several people spoke about the internal debate about the condition of anonymity to provide insights into their discussions.

For the Orthodox or conservative wing of the Catholic Church, the debate about Biden and abortion is about the future of the faith, which will be a little different in Europe when the Catholic-heavy nations become more secular and church attendance decreases there too. They fear that the church will be stripped of its core principles and replaced by liberal ideologies and sectarianism.

The sexual abuse scandal in the church – and the failure of Catholic church leaders to remove priests known to be child molesters – has often been blamed for the declining number of parishioners.

Some church historians argue that as the number of pews decreased, so did the more stringent participants who stayed, including those who would see Biden denied communion.

“It’s a serious crisis,” said Faggioli. “It’s not just a credibility crisis because of the sexual abuse crisis, it’s a catholicity crisis as well.”

Both Faggioli and Steven Millies, professor at the Catholic Theological Union, one of the largest English-speaking Catholic theology schools, argue that there has already been an irreconcilable break between the American Catholic leadership and the head of the Church in Rome. American church leaders are increasingly criticizing the Pope for being too liberal, too focused on issues like climate change and too willing to let Catholics like Biden go unchecked.

In the short term, Millies saw the gift that Francis Biden gave as a sign of efforts to prevent division within the Church. Among the gifts given to the President was a copy of the Fratelli Tutti, the Pope’s pamphlet on human brotherhood, which Biden often quoted in his campaign.

“It is an extremely important document. It has really fundamentally reformulated Catholic social teaching and we will be talking about it for decades,” said Millies. “That’s how he is [Francis] thinks about politics and society. Francis has consistently called for ‘better kind of politics’ since he was elected, and Fratelli Tutti is partly claiming that. “