Leo O'Donovan, a Jesuit priest and a past president of Georgetown University, will deliver the invocation at Joe Biden's presidential inauguration on January 20th. Biden personally telephoned him and invited him to offer the prayer.
Biden, a life-long Roman Catholic, is known to be close to a number of Jesuit priests. While he was vice president, Biden sometimes attended mass at Holy Trinity Catholic Church, a Jesuit sponsored Catholic parish in Washington D.C. Biden will be only the second Roman Catholic president of the United States, the first being the ill-fated John F. Kennedy.
O'Donovan is a longtime friend of Joe Biden and the Biden family. In 2015, O’Donovan presided at the funeral mass for Joe Biden's oldest son, Beau, who died of brain cancer at age 46. In 1992, when Biden's younger son, Hunter Biden, was a senior at Georgetown, O'Donovan invited the senator to give a lecture at that Jesuit university.
More recently, on Nov. 12, Biden appeared at a virtual fundraiser for Jesuit Refugee Service, where O'Donovan serves as director of mission. Biden announced that he would raise the annual admission target of new refugees into the United States to 125,000, a sharp increase to the Trump administration's cap of 15,000.
O'Donovan graduated first in his class from Georgetown in 1956. He received a Fulbright Scholarship to study at the University of Lyon in France, where he entered the Society of Jesus, the Jesuits.
“And they worshipped the dragon which gave power unto the beast: and they worshipped the beast, saying, Who is like unto the beast? who is able to make war with him?”
“The Roman Church now presents a fair front to the world, covering with apologies her record of horrible cruelties. She has clothed herself in Christlike garments; but she is unchanged. Every principle of the papacy that existed in past ages exists today. The doctrines devised in the darkest ages are still held. Let none deceive themselves. The papacy that Protestants are now so ready to honor is the same that ruled the world in the days of the Reformation, when men of God stood up, at the peril of their lives, to expose her iniquity. She possesses the same pride and arrogant assumption that lorded it over kings and princes, and claimed the prerogatives of God. Her spirit is no less cruel and despotic now than when she crushed out human liberty and slew the saints of the Most High.
“The papacy is just what prophecy declared that she would be, the apostasy of the latter times. 2 Thessalonians 2:3, 4. It is a part of her policy to assume the character which will best accomplish her purpose; but beneath the variable appearance of the chameleon she conceals the invariable venom of the serpent.” Great Controversy, p. 571