WASHINGTON (RNS) When President Joe Biden took the oath of office on Wednesday (Jan. 20), he became only the second Catholic president in U.S. history.
But when he marched off the Capitol grounds later in the day, he reentered a much larger group: a peculiar, hyperpolitical faith community that makes the nation’s capital one of the most active and ardent Catholic centers.
Those believers who live in what locals call “the District” are a complex, multilayered web of cardinals and other churchmen, politicians, professors and everyday Catholics who also happen to regularly rub elbows with the most powerful people on the planet. It’s a community Biden has known for decades, but one that already looks markedly different from when he left the vice president’s official home, Number One Observatory Circle, to return to his home state of Delaware just four years ago.
“It is truly ugly. How very sad,” Deacon Keith Fournier of the Diocese of Richmond, Virginia, tweeted. “The Catholic Church has such beautiful art. This increasingly ugly world is hungering for beauty. Why would this be chosen?”
A host on Relevant Radio, a Catholic network, called the display “unusually modernistic.” Art historian Elizabeth Lev in America Magazine, a Jesuit publication, noted the “universal outpouring of mockery.” And The New York Post said “if it were a Broadway play, it probably would have closed on opening night.”
Seemingly on the defensive, an article posted this week to the Vatican’s official news website says the 2020 “Christmas crib” is said to hold “cultural heritage not immediately visible to the eye.” The 52-piece ceramic display was made in the style that is typical of Castelli, Italy, which is known internationally for its pottery, the article states. Students and teachers assembled the set over 10 years, from 1965 to 1975.