Biden and the Pope | Profile

The United States had only one Catholic president, John F. Kennedy. From January 20, Joe Biden will be the second. That Catholic presidents are from the Democratic Party and none from the Republican Party is not enough to build a trend, but Joe Biden will put respect for human rights at the center of his international policy and in his relations with China as during the war. cold Democratic president and religious practitioner – James Carter – did it with the former Soviet Union.

In September 2015, during Francis’ historic official visit to the United States, he was the only pope to speak on Capitol Hill, the secular temple of global democracy, and who stood behind him, applauding, was Joe Biden ( photo), then Vice President of the United States and President of the Senate. This speech was – in part – a preview of the last encyclical of the Pope, Fratelli tutti, on fraternity and social friendship, published last October 3 “given in Assisi, next to the tomb of Saint Francis”.

Kennedy was the only Catholic President of the United States before Joe Biden, whom Francis blessed

In 2015, the Pope asked North American lawmakers “that politics should not be subject to economics and finances”, proposing a middle way between two failures: “Cuban egalitarianism and American neoliberalism”. In his speech, he referred to the “Four American Saints: Lincoln for Freedom, Luther King for Inclusion and Human Rights, Dorothy Day for the Struggle for Justice and Thomas Merton for the Practice of Interfaith Dialogue” . He defended immigrants, pleaded for the abolition of the death penalty and concluded in his English scholar with “God bless America”, God bless America.

By then, Francis had published his encyclical Laudato si ‘(Praise yourself) with an emphasis on ecology, but by then many Republicans called Francis “the communist Pope.” In Fratelli tutti, the Pope advances in a truly universal political proposal at the same time that Joe Biden will try to rebuild the character of the world leader of the United States on behalf of the Western democracies: “America is back”, he said. he declares. An alliance between the next president of the United States and Pope Francis could be functional for this mission.

Many of the problems facing North America have a solution in the encyclical Fratelli tutti. For example, the polarization of his society, where Trump lost but got more votes than when he was elected in 2016 and where Trumpism is more alive than Donald Trump himself. And in this divide that plagues the United States lies its loss of global supremacy because a leader must have intertemporal consistency, whether Republicans or Democrats rule, a traditional politician like Biden or an outsider like Trump, some policies will always be maintained. Trump was the architect of intertemporal inconsistency and as long as the divided society remains, even if a moderate rules, the possibility of the return of another foreigner will always be present while in China there is no rift. and move in a straight line. As demonstrated by the RCEP (Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership) pact, where China forms an alliance with Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand with the ten members of the Association of Southeast Asian Countries (Brunei , Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam). RCEP represents a higher percentage of global gross product than the European Union and the North American Treaty between Canada, the United States and Mexico, being the response to Trump’s rejection of the Economic Cooperation Agreement treaty Transpacific in which, simplified, the United States has been replaced by China and Mexico, Canada, Chile and Peru by South Korea.

That Biden is a conservative within the Democrats, more to the right than his party average, coupled with the fact that Republicans have increased their representation in Congress, will make Trump’s transition less abrupt. But the rift is a fact that in one way resembles the United States to the underdeveloped countries, even with the differences that populisms in developed countries emerge as the voice of those who fall and cling to the past while in countries underdeveloped, of those who are down and want to go up.

Fratelli tutti is a conceptual polarization vaccine. Some paragraphs say: “In many countries the political mechanism of exasperation, exacerbation and polarization is used.” “Many platforms promote the meeting between people who think the same way, preventing the confrontation of differences … promoting prejudice and hatred.” He criticizes the leader who “seeks to gain popularity by exacerbating the inferior and more selfish inclinations of certain sectors of the population”. “The debate is often animated by certain interests which have greater power, dishonestly trying to tilt public opinion in their favor. I’m not just talking about the government of the day, because manipulative power can be economic, political, media, religious, or whatever it is. “Reuniting does not mean going back to the time before the conflicts. Over time, we have all changed. The pain and the confrontations have transformed us … Those who have been hard at disagreement speak of the truth, clear and bare … of the historical truth of the facts, they will be able to make the persistent and long effort to understand each other and to try a new synthesis for the good of all ”. “We tend to deliberately build enemies: stereotypical characters, who concentrate in them all the characteristics that society perceives or interprets as dangerous. The mechanisms of formation of these images are the same which, at the time, allowed the expansion of racist ideas ”.

Biden’s Mission to Reconcile Americans Founded in Encyclical Fratelli Tutti

The task of Biden, who after the election received the Pope’s congratulations and blessing, is to make Americans feel that they are playing the same game and have a common project for the country. To pass it on later and woo the world: it is impossible for a nation to have moral prestige polarized into a rift.