America now has its second Catholic president. It took 60 years and, in some ways, the two eras could hardly be more different for American Catholics. In 1960, John F. Kennedy worried that many American Protestants would not vote for him because he was a Catholic. In 2020, Joe Biden had more reason to be concerned that it would be his fellow Catholics that would refuse to vote for him.
But there is a key similarity. President Biden comes into office uniquely positioned to work productively with a powerful ally in the Vatican on an issue that a week into his presidency he has already described to the American people as “an existential threat:” climate change. Sixty years ago, when nuclear annihilation posed the greatest threat to humanity, a like-minded pope helped Kennedy to broaden domestic public support for a change in Washington’s posture in the Cold War, preparing Catholic opinion in particular for a shift in the rhetoric towards Moscow. There may be some lessons for the incoming Biden-Harris administration as it grapples with the fact that 74 million Americans voted for a climate-change denier.
