Which goes back to the heartless bureaucrats I encountered working at a child services agency. Part of the challenge is simply a set of practical, technical questions: Perhaps these workers need better wages, different training, or reduced caseloads. But, CST would say, there’s also the much bigger question of how these workers (and anyone else) engage social life itself. Those engagements, according to CST, must always be rooted in relationships, a key insight of the Catholic intellectual movement known as personalism, which claims the politically distinct Popes Francis, John Paul II, and Benedict XVI as members, alongside Dorothy Day and, well, Joe Biden. It might actually be the case that we need to throw money at the problem. Indeed, that’s Biden’s bet with the COVID relief bill. But personalism insists that money is never enough. For that matter, an ambitious plan or a clever organizational chart isn’t enough either. Everything has to be rooted in relationships, in the constant reminder these are real people with real stories.

Joe Biden’s faith in relationships might well be naïve. (Look at what his faith in the collegiality of the Senate has gotten him so far.) But it’s hard to miss the Catholic quality of it, the sense that big projects also need big hearts. And we keep heart through keeping up with one another, in conversations and in care, and in what appears to be 10 million phone calls a day. Look at the way Biden swore in his staff on Inauguration Day, insisting that he’d fire on the spot anyone who was disrespectful: As quoted in Politico, he said, “Everyone, every single person, regardless of their background, is entitled to be treated with dignity.”

Biden’s centering of individual lives—and our individual obligations to check in on those lives—gets to the heart of Catholic social teaching, the heavy weight of it, the personal responsibility of it. That’s an important reminder for liberals who’d rather let the state solve society’s problems and conservatives who’d rather trust the market. In either case, you’ve still got to be invested in actual people’s lives. Especially people who are different from you. Especially people who are suffering. You’ve still got to make the calls. This is Biden’s ongoing accomplishment and his ongoing hope: a big state with a big heart.

That bigheartedness can also be a huge pain. Sometimes we don’t need to wait to make sure everyone’s heard. Sometimes we simply need to use our power. Still, many Americans, Catholic or not, are a lot like Biden: They’re suspicious of the big state, and that suspicion manifests in the suggestion that we just solve our problems together. Recent talk of “coming together” can be either naïve or suggested in bad faith, but it reveals an ongoing American obsession with something like Catholic subsidiarity. And remember: Subsidiarity is not anti-government.  It’s not, despite how conservatives might describe it, “government as necessary evil.” At its simplest, subsidiarity is a recognition that politics is simply the way we come together to solve our problems, at “the lowest level possible and the highest level necessary.” To progressives, that might sound as maudlin as a since-scrapped Bruce Springsteen Super Bowl ad, but there’s no doubt that it plays to a big crowd.

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In his response to Benedict’s “Caritas in Veritate,” the conservative Catholic George Weigel was so incensed that he insisted the letter could be highlighted with red and gold markers, the gold representing the parts that are really from Benedict and the red representing socialist junk forced upon him by the hippies. Weigel’s argument was widely criticized, especially for attacking a pope not really known for needing intellectual aid. Yet this desire to split Catholic social teaching into the conservative bits and the wrong bits is about as old as the current fusion of Catholic theology and Republican politics, all the way back to William F. Buckley Jr. insisting that the Catholic Church might well be his mother, but she’s not his teacher.

Conservatives often accuse Catholic progressives of being “cafeteria Catholics,” picking and choosing what they want from church teaching. Yet regardless of what constitutes cafeteria Catholicism, it seems clear that conservatives are there too, and well before Francis had them admitting it. Conservatives might want to claim Biden writes his Catholicism in a red pen. The problem is that Catholic teaching has been written in that color all along.

• Joe Biden
• Religion
• Catholic Church
• Pope Francis

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