Joe Biden and Catholicism in the United States by Massimo Faggioli

Abstract

students and teachers to formulate prayers in their own words according to their specific needs and circumstances. Part 5 is entitled ‘Ignatian Tips for Keeping Balance in our Mental Health: An Advisory’. Once again, Gleeson borrows from McManus for this section. This part begins with an excellent synopsis of the common-sense advice that McManus prepared for young people trying to cope with fragile mental health. Immediately following this advice is a prayer from Edith Stein, or St Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, who died in Auschwitz. In a delicate ‘Afterword’, Gleeson recalls the ‘togetherness’ that Australians feel on ANZAC Day and teases out the universal implications of this sentiment by recalling the radical sense of union and harmony that St Ignatius and his early companions felt both in the universe and among each other. The book finishes with a Hope prayer inspired by Liam Lawton’s Hope Prayer-Words to Nourish the Soul, published in Ireland in 2009. This beautiful little book, Springboards, is clearly one inviting collective action rather than individual contemplation. It has the flavour more of a set of spiritual exercises, than a lectio divina. From his vast educational experience, Chris Gleeson has provided a valuable spiritual guide-book to students, teachers and the wider educational community, to help all of them navigate leadership challenges in a discerning, balanced way. Springboards is much more than a book of prayers. Ashley Evans SJ (as above). Massimo Faggioli, Joe Biden and Catholicism in the United States (New London, CT: Bayard, 2021), 176 pages. Pope Francis’ speech to the US Congress on 24 September 2015 focused on the American dream of both civil liberty and civil rights. When he gave his speech, he was flanked by two Catholic congressmen, John Boehner and Joe Biden. His speech focused on some key intellectual sources of Christianity in the United States that moved the dial away from a conservative reading of the history. He proposed Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr, Dorothy Day, and Thomas Merton as four of its key figures. The latter two are significant because they shaped the thought of left social Catholicism, and argued for radical social justice in early and mid-twentieth-century America. Both Day Studies • volume 110 • number 439 389 Autumn 2021: Book Reviews and Merton wrote about the spirituality of non-violence and civil rights, especially focusing on eradicating poverty, racism, the death penalty and war. Inhismostrecentbook,MassimoFaggioli,achurchhistorianandProfessor of Theology and Religious Studies at Villanova University in Philadelphia, who has written some important scholarly works on the reception of the Second Vatican Council within the Catholic church, reflects on the role and significance of Catholicism in the life of the incumbent US president Joe Biden and in the US more generally. His focus here is on the impact of a Biden administration on US Catholicism. He describes the election of Biden as ‘a particularly Catholic moment’, but also one that reflects deep tensions between two different ideological camps within the church in the US. In fact, Biden’s Catholicism has divided American Catholics in a way that was unthinkable during John F Kennedy’s presidency. The change, according to Faggioli, is to be understood in the light of the developing political culture wars in the country. It also encompasses a neo-conservative, neo-traditionalist shift towards a new form of illiberalism, which is critical of the main thrust of American democracy, itself rooted in a strain of liberalism to be found uniquely in the US. Faggioli’s work probes a significant question: what does it mean to be both American and Catholic in the twenty-first century? This has wider significance because of the influence of American Catholicism on political life within the United States. The American church in the last century was the largest and richest domestic Catholic church in the world, with indirect implications for Irish Catholicism. For many decades in the US, Catholic progressive politics had contributed to issues of economic justice, human rights, healthcare, education, social welfare, the anti-war movement, racial justice, and refugees and migration, and all this had a global reach and influence. Following on from the Kennedy era, Catholics had begun to feel they were...