The Catholics Who Hate Joe Biden—And Pope Francis
Updated at 3:00 p.m. ET on October 21, 2020.
Joe Biden or Donald Trump: Who’s the better Catholic? If this seems like an odd question to raise in the context of a race for the highest secular office in America—and a race in which one of the two candidates is Protestant—never mind. Both campaigns, and their surrogates, are hotly contesting the answer.
The ex–Notre Dame football coach Lou Holtz slammed Biden as a “Catholic in name only” in his appearance at the Republican National Convention.
“President Trump is ignoring Catholic teachings on care for the Earth, feeding the hungry, welcoming the immigrant,” Sister Simone Campbell, a social-justice activist who led a prayer at the Democratic convention, fired back in an interview with me not long after.
Father James Altman of La Crosse, Wisconsin, weighed in with a video that hit YouTube on August 30 and has garnered more than 1 million views to date: “You cannot be Catholic and be a Democrat … Repent of your support of that party and its platform or face the fires of hell!”
“Still think [Trump] is pro-life?” Lexington, Kentucky, Bishop John Stowe taunted on two weeks later. Stowe
