The assistant director of African American Affairs at the U.S. bishops’ conference praised Joe Biden’s choice of Sen. Kamala Harris as his presidential running mate, calling the news “wonderful.”
“I was so elated. We, the community, need good news, and this was just wonderful,” Donna Toliver Grimes told Catholic News Service, the official news service of the U.S. bishops’ conference (USCCB).
Grimes said that black Catholics can expect Biden and Harris to enact policy that is “favorable to people on the margins.”
“If I say ‘for African Americans,’ it benefits other people on the margins as well,” she said.
“I would expect he (Biden) would put good people in his Cabinet, who would not damage the agencies, or ignore the mission,” she added.
While Harris was not Grimes’s “top candidate” during the primaries, the USCCB official said Harris is “really deserving and brings a lot to the table.”
Other Catholic leaders have not been so sanguine about Biden’s choice of running mate, noting her consistent support for abortion-on-demand and her historical hostility toward Catholics.
In an essay this week, Catholic League President Bill Donohue said Harris has a “Catholic problem” that could hurt Biden’s chances of winning over Catholic voters.
Harris has tainted herself “with the brush of anti-Catholicism,” Dr. Donohue noted, by harassing Catholic judicial nominees and subjecting them to the equivalent of a religious litmus test.
In 2018, Harris suggested that membership in the Knights of Columbus disqualified a candidate for the federal bench during the examination of federal district court nominee Brian Buescher.
Harris’s stated objection to the Knights of Columbus stemmed from its unapologetic pro-life position, Donohue observed, but “her real target was the Catholic Church.”
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