The nuns who could help Biden win Iowa

DUBUQUE, Iowa — When Joe Biden came to town last October on a campaign swing, he left the press behind and drove high up into the rolling hills to call on a group of old friends.

Armed with cookies, the former vice president paid a visit to the Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, one of five congregations of Catholic nuns that call Dubuque home. Some 150 sisters live at Mount Carmel, as the nuns call the hilltop where they built their convent in 1893. In a video later posted to Biden’s Instagram account, several dozen of them were seen smiling and hugging the Democratic presidential hopeful as he worked the room while grinning like a matinee teenage idol.

Biden was still smiling a few hours later when he took the microphone at a rally at a local Catholic university and called out a close friend and local Democratic activist, Teri Goodmann, for “always bringing me up to see the nuns up on the hill.”

“They give me hope,” he said. “They really do — not a joke.”

The nuns had been there when he lost his wife and daughter in a car crash in 1972, Biden explained, and when his oldest son, Beau, passed away from brain cancer in 2015. Now, as he makes his third bid for the presidency, the former vice president is hoping they will be there for him once again.




https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/01/28/nuns-who-could-help-biden-win-iowa/