Jesus Comes To The White House - The Salvation Of Joe Biden

Joe Biden had been a good Catholic in his youth, an altar boy in fact, serving at mass every Sunday at the Church of the Sacred Heart in Wilmington, personal assistant to the Very Reverend Aloysius Mullins, Catechetical whiz, and tapped for the priesthood. 

Joe had always been a good boy, never a problem at school and at home, a model son and good student.  His report cards catalogued his seriousness.  “A remarkable boy…a delight to teach…a boy to make his parents proud”.

In short, he was an honor camper, the pick of the litter, the choice cut, the perfect fit.  While he might not have been the sharpest knife in the drawer, he certainly made up for his lack of aptitude with calling.  He was to serve God, he told his teachers and his family, and be done with it.  Life was no more than a way station – a littered, overheated, ramshackle place like those on the New York, New Haven & Hartford railroad – but he knew that patience and good intentions would reward him.

By the time he completed high school, he was confident that he would go to the seminary; but there was something in his application that troubled the fathers. While his religious piety was unquestioned, there was something disturbingly impious about the young man.  A flaccid intelligence Fr. John called it perhaps unkindly, but seconded by Frs. Martin and Paul.  The Church does not require geniuses, they agreed, but some enabling acuity was necessary.

“We are not Protestants”, replied Fr. Simon. “We do not do Biblical exegesis”

“I know, Father”, said Fr. John, “but the boy scrambles his parables and quotes Mark when he means Matthew. Remember how St. Paul had to repeatedly visit his churches in Thessalonica?  They were making Jesus out to be some Palestinian beggar with foresight. They needed to be corrected.”

 

“Yes, yes, Father, but he’s a good boy”, replied Fr. Simon, “and we can count on him to follow the Order of the Mass”. Simon was known as the ironic one.  He never doubted, but wished some things were otherwise.

“He would make a good politician, not a priest”, concluded Fr. John. “There is something insincere and overly careful about him.  Besides, his recasting of the Sermon on the Mount was genial”.  Father John had spent a post-seminarian year at the Dominican monastery in Castres and liked to pepper his speech with French.

Little did Fr. John know how right he was, for the rest is history.

The story however does not end there.  After decades of progressive secularism, public dismissal of religious sentiment and only desultory service to God and church when campaigning, Joe began to reflect more and more on God, Jesus Christ, and the Church of the Sacred Heart.  Perhaps it was his age – staring death in the face is not a pretty thing even for the President of the United States – or perhaps because his mind was wandering these days. 

No matter how insistently his handlers wanted him to stay on message (race, gender, ethnicity, climate, and the poor), he kept returning to the Wilmington, Rehoboth, and Dewey of his youth, all of which recollections had a religious touch to them.

“I always prayed to the Virgin Mary”, he began to a group of supporters in Sheboygan, “always dressed in blue, so pure and simply good, so….” Here he paused to fix in his mind the image of the statue of Mary on the altar of Sacred Heart. “…loving; and this is what I want to say to you today".

“The climate, Mr. President, the climate”, sang the voice of his chief aide in his earphone; but the President had a mind of his own and repeated almost verbatim, the first sermon that had ever made an impression on him, a sensitive eight-year old boy in the first pew - a sermon about sin, repentance, and the glory of Jesus Christ who died for our sins.

There were two sides to Joe Biden that had been kept separate during his long career – religion and politics.  He knew that religion was a mine field only to be trod when it was absolutely necessary, especially to show prospective voters that he believed; but recently he found that his spiritual side could not be denied.  Not only was he filling his speeches with religious allusions, he began to change the way business was done at the White House

He became increasingly hostile to the progressive views urged on him by his Vice President and her Congressional claques.  “Buggery is wrong”, he confided to his wife in bed one night.  “We wouldn’t even be here if it were up to them”.

By ‘them’ he meant all the gender activists who insisted that sex between a man and a woman was a discredited, outmoded, and scientifically false idea.  He loved his mother and his father, his wife Jill, and his two sons, all made possible because of God’s will.  His imprimatur was on everything, the President knew, and it was time to change nameplates and signage.

White House colloquies on the environment, The Black Man, social injustice, and wealth redistribution were shelved for a more faith-based agenda; and those invited to speak to the Cabinet were more often than not drawn from church and synagogue.

Rabbi Samuel Bernstein was his favorite. Although tempted to go Catholic only, he had befriended the rabbi in his days in the Senate when sessions were opened by a cleric rotated among the religions.  Bernstein was a mensch, Biden thought at the time, but was far too conservative, too Jewish, and too Biblical for the young politician’s taste.

Now, his discourses made sense, his Biblical originalism, and Old Testament sound and fury resonated with the President.  God must be heard, said the rabbi, and the President finally began to listen.

The cast and character of the White House, however, was distinctly Catholic; and despite legalisms and warnings from his attorneys that images of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph in the White House were abrogating the Constitutional mandate to separate church and state, the President found ways to show them – a Mass card with a Mary at Lourdes on his desk, a sprig of dogwood flowers, always a Christian symbol because of their cruciform shape, a small font of holy water by the door.

The most significant change in his President, however, was his singular dismissal of woke causes.  Race, for all the howling and hectoring was a non-starter. Jesus saves all people regardless of color.  We all will serve at his right hand or will burn together in hell. Ignoring that simple fact and banging on about racism, blackness, and identity was senseless.

Family is at the core of the Old and New Testaments, recounted the President. The Trinity itself, enshrining the divinity of Father and Son is at the core of Christian teaching.  The Books of Kings is all about progeny.  The progressive gender agenda, demeaning and marginalizing heterosexual families, is historically, physiologically, and religiously wrong.

The Environment is God’s creation come what may.  If he chooses to change the climate and readjust human settlements in response, that’s his business.  The Earth is but one insignificant bit of an infinite universe, and we still get twisted about a few degrees?

Thanks to his newly-expressed religious sentiments, he lost many progressive voters, gained thousands of Christian ones, but both sides wanted no part of a President who wobbled this way and that, wandered into the weeds and came up dazed and confused.  Today Jesus, tomorrow who could tell?

The Vice-President became the de facto president once the President went completely off the rails, stopped making any sense whatsoever, religious or not, and was more of a liability than an asset.  The elections of 2024 were just around the corner, and better to shelve this neo-zealot and keep him out of sight.