Jo Renee Formicola offers an important and thoughtful new book on the complicated leadership and governance of President Joe Biden, America’s second Catholic President. Her book features two detailed case studies on abortion and immigration covering the period from June 2022 to May 2023, with a focus on how the administration responded to the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson decision on abortion and to the court’s Title 42, “Remain in Mexico” decision. Professor Formicola finds that President Biden has struggled with Church teachings and that his decision-making approach has done little to implement effective and robust policy solutions. She presents a careful, balanced, and critical assessment of President Biden’s approach to these two critical and contentious policy issues.
— Paul Christopher Manuel, Mount Saint Mary's University, Georgetown University
In this thorough research, with the painstaking skill of a seasoned academic, Dr. Formicola masterfully x-rays the regrettable absence of statesmanship as exemplified by President Joe Biden through his intransigence, and those of his political constituency, toward abortion and immigration. This is an important contribution to political science, political theology, Church-State relations, and Catholic Social Teaching.
— Father Valentine Iheanacho, University of the Free State, South Africa
Formicola’s book provides a valuable corrective to the trendy theory that religion does not have much political significance as the United States enters a post-Christian phase. Formicola challenges the president to reconcile the contradiction between his claims to piety and his rejection of his own religious leaders’ moral teaching: “On the one hand, the President cannot pretend to support the Church and his personal sense of Catholicism while, on the other, carry out a political policy that is essentially designed to obliterate his religion’s most basic precept, that is, the protection of life for all” (120). If Biden would imitate Democratic president Franklin Roosevelt, who made common cause with a community of Catholic volunteer workers and theologians, Formicola believes Pope Francis would “exhort subordinates to move toward reconciliation . . . [and] unity on the contentious issues of abortion and immigration” (124... [This] book offers advice not only for Biden but for all Catholic political leaders. If Catholic Democrats focus merely on turning out the party’s left-wing base, Formicola might prove prophetic of future failures to secure a majority of their own church’s voters.
— American Catholic Studies