How a 'rosary-carrying, prayer-quoting Catholic' got to the White House

Joe Biden is sworn in as the 46th president of the United States, only the second ever Catholic to reach that office. Picture: Saul Loeb/Pool Photo via AP

In the spring of 1980, as 37-year-old US senator Joe Biden, a Catholic from Pennsylvania, was preparing to leave for Rome for a scheduled meeting with Pope John Paul II, he received one final bit of advice from his mother. “Don’t you kiss his ring,” she told her son. When he got to the Vatican, Biden didn’t.

Looking back, after he had been inaugurated as the 46th president of the United States and becoming only the second Catholic to hold that high office, one commentator wrote: “His refusal has become a hallmark of how Biden manages his faith, a throwback to a brand of mid-20th-century political Catholicism that eschews obsessive obedience to the Holy See on matters of faith.”