Cracks In The Creation Myth

I'm old enough to remember 1972 (I was young enough to support McGovern, but apparently, though of age, I didn't bother to vote for him, because I think my first vote in a presidential election was for Gerald Ford). I also remember the orchestrated media sob session when the newly elected Sen Biden from Delaware lost his wife and daughter in an auto accident that December. This was the start of the Biden creation myth, but more of that later.

A visitor kindly sent me a link to a story at Life Site News that renewed my overall sense of Biden skepticism, Was Joe and Jill Biden’s 1977 wedding at the United Nations done according to Canon Law? This, of course, is the second phase of the Biden creation myth, the marriage to Dr Jill signifying his recovery from setback and tragedy. A typical version is this cloying tribute in Politico:

There is no person in American politics today whose life has been so shaped by loss and grief. The long arc of Biden’s career is all but bracketed by tragedy. In 1972, his wife and baby daughter were killed in a car accident; in 2015, one of his two sons who had survived the crash died of a rare strain of brain cancer. These wretched tentpoles are not only tragedies the 76-year-old Biden has had to endure. They influenced major decisions he made about his political career. . . . And they defined him as a person as well. . . . They made him more relatable, more authentic, more empathetic. These traits, they say, were there already, instilled by his working-class roots and the teachings of the Catholic church, his mother’s tenets of social justice and his father’s mantra to get up, get up, after getting knocked down—but they were amplified by what Biden was made to learn about himself, and about life, as he fought through these ordeals.

The storybook remarriage to Dr Jill is but one example. But what about the teachings of the Catholic Church, which have done so much to make him the more reliable, authentic, empathetic leader he's become? According to the story linked above,

In “Where the Light Enters: Building a Family, Discovering Myself “(2019), Jill’s autobiography, we learn that she and Joe were married at the UN Chapel on June 17, 1977 – and, she says, “by a Catholic priest.”

. . . Given that Joe has been a “priest-collector” his whole life, why go to New York to be married by an anonymous priest? Was he even a priest in good standing?

. . . Online searches for information on the UN Chapel turns up an article about it in the New York Times from May 9, 1976 (“UN Chapel Weddings: Ecumenical Spirit”). The chaplain was a Rev. Dr. Melvin Hawthorne, a minister of the United Methodist Church. He says that the chapel does not have an actual relationship with the United Nations, but that many people associated with the UN do opt for his chapel. In 1976, the chapel was the site of over 400 weddings, 60 percent of which were for couples of different faiths, many of whom had “run into snags elsewhere.”

So, what might the “snags” have been for the devout Catholic Joe Biden and his fiancée? A number of permissions would have been needed (e.g., mixed marriage since Jill is not Catholic; permission to marry outside a church or oratory). Did they participate in the required pre-nuptial investigation, which should have uncovered that Jill was previously married in February 1970 and divorced in March 1975?

An article in the July 24, 1977 edition of Wilmington, Delaware newspaper The Morning News, titled “‘Catholic’ Joe Biden avoids telling the press his wife is a divorcee,” reports Biden saying, “I thought the fact that Jill was married before had no relevance.”

The Catechism of the Catholic Church says,

1635 According to the law in force in the Latin Church, a mixed marriage needs for liceity the express permission of ecclesiastical authority. In case of disparity of cult an express dispensation from this impediment is required for the validity of the marriage. This permission or dispensation presupposes that both parties know and do not exclude the essential ends and properties of marriage; and furthermore that the Catholic party confirms the obligations, which have been made known to the non-Catholic party, of preserving his or her own faith and ensuring the baptism and education of the children in the Catholic Church.

The story at Life Site News asks,

If that ceremony was recognized by the Church, it should have been entered into the marriage register of the parish church in whose boundaries the UN Chapel sits, which is Holy Family Church.

The pastor, Father Gerald Murray (coincidentally, a canon lawyer) and well-known member of Raymond Arroyo’s “Papal Posse” on EWTN, stated clearly that no such ceremony or any file for that event is to be found at Holy Family Church. Murray went on to mention that several weddings of Catholics at the UN Chapel are, in fact, registered at his church.

This confirms my view that Biden is mostly a Catholic by convenience, and, pace Politico, the teachings of the Church have never been much of a guiding principle for him -- what sort of an example of marriage has he set for his own children, after all? But this raises another question about the Biden creation myth, the nature of his and Jill's first marriages. According to the received version:

As Joe Biden tells the story, he first saw Jill’s photo on an advertisement in Wilmington, Delaware in March 1975. His brother Frank, who knew the model from college, set Joe up on a blind date the following night. They saw a movie together on the date, fell in love and never looked back.

But according to Jill's ex-husband, Bill Stevenson, at the same link,

he and Jill first got to know Joe Biden when Biden was a county councilman in New Castle, Delaware. Stevenson says he asked for Biden’s help obtaining a liquor license. Stevenson also says he threw a fundraiser for Joe that raised between $2,500 and $3,000.

“We got married in '70, I introduced Joe to Jill in ‘72. Right before the election in ‘72, Jill, Joe, Neilia and I were in his kitchen. How do you forget that?” Stevenson said.

That would be three years before the now-famous “blind date.” Stevenson says his first inkling something was up came when Jill refused to go with him to meet Bruce Springsteen, who was booked to appear at The Stone Balloon.

“She said, ‘Joe asked me to keep an eye on the boys.' And I just thought in the back of my mind, ‘hmm!’” Stevenson said.

So by this account, Joe first met Jill at the start of his political career, before his election to the senate and before the December 1972 accident. While Richardson publicly claims the affair with Joe started in 1974, that appears to have been only when he first said, "hmm!", and it could have begun any time after they first met, which by his account would have been before the accident. (Jill has denied this.)

What of the accident itself? The focus has always been on Joe's claim that his wife and daughter were killed by a drunk driver, but the record has never reflected this.

Numerous news reports indicate Neilia Biden was pulling away from a stop sign — not "running" a stop sign — when the collision occurred. Early news stories also did not describe the other driver as being drunk.

. . . In a story from August 2020, The News Journal in Delaware said Neilia Biden was driving west on Valley Road, a then-rural road in Hockessin, around 2:30 p.m. on Dec. 18. Her station wagon "pulled away from the stop sign" at an intersection when she was struck by the front side of the tractor-trailer being driven by Curtis Dunn, who was on his way home to Pennsylvania.

Investigators found that alcohol didn’t play a role in the crash, according to a 2008 News Journal story. Dunn, who died in 1999, was not charged. But, the paper reported, Biden has suggested that Dunn was intoxicated when the crash occurred.

. . . The police file for the crash no longer exists but, Politico reported in 2019, "coverage in the newspapers at the time made clear that fault was not in question. For whatever reason, Neilia Biden, who was holding the baby, ended up in the right of way of Dunn’s truck coming down a long hill." She had a stop sign and Dunn did not[.]

It doen't sound as if Neilia's blood was tested in the course of any autopsy, or if it was, the news was suppressed by people connected with the senator-elect. All we know is that the press at the time and since has insisted that no alcohol was involved, although we then have the issue of how a mother with an infant and two toddlers in the car could be so distracted as to pull away from a rural stop sign into the path of an 18-wheeler. Other causes certainly can't be ruled out, including suicide or depression.

Given what we're belatedly learning about the Biden family, so many of Joe's siblings, children, in-laws, nieces, and nephews struggling with adultery, alcoholism, and addiction, it's hard not to wonder how Joe might in some way be responsible for some part of it, or if he in some way does more than just enable it. Paragraph 1832 of the Catechism says,

1832 The fruits of the Spirit are perfections that the Holy Spirit forms in us as the first fruits of eternal glory. The tradition of the Church lists twelve of them: "charity, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, generosity, gentleness, faithfulness, modesty, self-control, chastity."

I've certainly gone to confession and had the priest ask me how, if I'm Catholic, I'm not displaying more of the fruits of the Spirit. So much the more do I ponder this about professed Catholic Joe and what his family's conduct says about him.