Do the Vice President and Larycia Hawkins Worship the Same God?

The answer appears to be “yes”:

And I know there’s a lot of fear and unease around the world. The President and I travel around the world a lot, and all you got to do is just look at the recent attacks in Belgium and Turkey and Pakistan. And while fear is understandable, exploiting that fear is absolutely unacceptable. When innocent people are ostracized simply because of their faith, when we turn our backs on the victims of evil and persecution, it’s just wrong.

So it’s up to us — and you’ve been the leaders in this country — to recognize that fear, but also try to allay that fear, and to help people understand that what unites us is a lot more than what divides us. And it’s embodied in just not what we believe but what we say.

We all practice the same basic faith but different faiths. I happen to be a practicing Catholic, and I grew up learning from the nuns and the priests who taught me what we used to call Catholic social doctrine. But it’s not fundamentally different than a doctrine of any of the great confessional faiths. It’s what you do to the least among us that you do unto me. It’s we have an obligation to one another. It’s we cannot serve ourselves at the expense of others, and that we have a responsibility to future generations.

All faiths have a version of these teachings, and we all practice and preach that we should practice what we say. Opening doors to the victims of war, as the President has been trying to do — a war of terrorism and oppression. Accepting people of all faiths and respecting their right to practice their religion as they choose, or choose not to practice any religion. Resisting the urge to let our fears overcome what we value most — our openness, our freedom, and our freedom to practice our faith.

And a faith that sees and shines light in dark moments is what you’ve preached. And my favorite hymn in my church is based on the 91st Psalm, Mr. President — it’s “On Eagle’s Wings.” And it’s my wish for all of you. You may remember the refrain. It says: He will raise you up on eagle’s wings, and bear you on the breath of dawn. Make you to shine like the sun, and hold you in the palm of His hand.

Why doesn’t Vice President Biden even consider that this view of faith might be scary from the perspective of the pre-Vatican II Roman Catholicism on which he was reared (I suppose)?

2 thoughts on “Do the Vice President and Larycia Hawkins Worship the Same God?

  1. We often point to V2 as a turning point, and it is, but not because the church as a whole was teaching something new. V2 marked the official endorsement of what much of the church was already doing, at least in the West. The Magisterium was all, “Well, looks like we goofed on keeping out the modernism. Might as well embrace it.” Biden likely grew up in a liberal parish, it would seem.

    What is interesting is his assertion that his religion isn’t fundamentally different from Islam or Protestantism or something else. Will he be corrected by somebody for using his position of influence to disseminate false teaching, and in theory if nothing changes that teaching should be false? Probably not.

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  2. Biden sounds quite like the Vatican to me: Jesus is best, but only by matter of degree. We are all children of God. There are many roads, but only one Teilhardian evolutionary process, one divine interior skeleton in Jesus, or some such similar Make-It-All-Harmonize-as-we-Go-Go. As Ratzinger has pretty much admitted, with the discovery of a diverse world of belief, the Magisterium lost its nerve and was “like, well, we can’t really just condemn everyone on earth now, can we?” Enter the Council, Saint John Paul II The Great, and “The Universal Salvific Will of God,” a novelty if ever there was one.

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