Will Joe Biden turn to his faith and follow in Benedict’s path?

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Michael W. Higgins, author of the forthcoming The Jesuit Disruptor: a Personal Portrait of Pope Francis, is Basilian Distinguished Fellow of Contemporary Catholic Thought at the University of Toronto’s St. Michael’s College.

Will he or won’t he?

For weeks now, Americans of all political persuasions – and non-Americans with a more-than-passing interest in the flourishing of democracy – have been speculating on whether U.S. President Joe Biden will step down from his august position in the interests of his party, following his egregiously flawed debate performance with his egregiously flawed presidential opponent, Donald Trump.

Whether Mr. Biden elects to resign as chief executive or persists in his unshakable belief that he and he alone can defeat Mr. Trump, he can find an imperfect but instructive analogue for his decision-making by looking at a prominent figure in the religious tradition he adheres to: Pope Benedict XVI.

Mr. Biden takes his Catholic faith seriously and does not disguise his practice. He has been excoriated by many American bishops appalled by his pledge to fight the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision overturning the country’s abortion legislation, although the President took consolation when, on a visit to meet Pope Francis in 2021, the pontiff told him he was a “good Catholic.”

He is not the first Catholic U.S. President to find himself embattled because of his Catholicism. But for John F. Kennedy, it wasn’t some of his fellow Catholics he found himself at war with, but the Protestant majority who harboured fears that he would take his orders from Rome. He brilliantly expunged that shibboleth in a speech in September, 1960, to non-Catholic ministers in Houston just prior to his election.

I have always seen Kennedy as a cultural Catholic and Mr. Biden as a committed Catholic, so in looking east to the Tiber, Mr. Biden might find a template for resignation, should he choose to go that route.

Of course, a pontifical resignation and a presidential resignation have more differences than similarities, and the institutional costs are at marked variance. But there are striking commonalities nonetheless.

While Benedict’s decision was made in private, communicated in Latin at a meeting with dicasterial cardinals, and totally unexpected, Mr. Biden’s decision is playing out in public in the very midst of a general election without precedent, and under the relentless glare of an omnivorous media. There is no Latin to soothe the soul or confound the detractors.

When the two major Catholic political columnists at The New York Times – the cradle and liberal Maureen Dowd, and the convert and conservative Ross Douthat – agree that their fellow Catholic in the White House needs to go, we are looking at more than a writerly congruence.

Although the pro-remain crowd and the pro-leave crowd weigh their respective proposals on a turbulent and shifting stage, the protagonist remains firmly stalwart and unbending. Mr. Biden has his reasons. Benedict, too, had his reasons. He discerned, after much thought and prayer, that the office of Supreme Pontiff would be better served with someone else in charge; that his energies both physical and emotional were depleted; that he had become an obstacle; that his leadership had been compromised by scandal; that he was no longer an agent of unity.

In retirement, Benedict worked out a respectful and mutually affectionate modus vivendi with his successor Pope Francis. His physical health actually improved and he recovered his intellectual energy, writing a steady stream of works. And although there were some keen on using him as an instrument of orthodox resistance to Francis, Benedict refused to be complicit in any act of disloyalty. Although there were occasional misjudgments, he became for Francis an eminence grise – or perhaps more aptly, an eminence blanche.

Likewise, should Mr. Biden decide to resign, he could marshal his formidable experience, acquired wisdom, and the reservoirs of goodwill that he enjoys across the partisan spectrum to support a successor pledged to renew the country’s political health.

He has a model in Benedict. Of course, unlike the pope, he has a constituency of electors (the pope is voted in only by his peers, a College of Cardinals), and millions who look to him for leadership that can bolster the crumbling structures of civility, law, and shared prosperity in a global superpower. He has a personal history of rising above adversity, upending the expectations of those who discount him, so resignation may strike him as capitulation, or even betrayal.

That’s where humility plays its part. Benedict also felt the competing emotions of sorrow and disappointment – but he knew that he served the office and not the office him, that leadership sometimes requires self-abnegation, and that leaving the stage is not a failure, but an ultimate act of service.