Millions of viewers on Wednesday were astonished at the size of the aging leather-bound Bible used when President Joe Biden took the oath of office, a volume substantially larger than the common pocket-sized editions of Holy Writ.
But in Biden's childhood the book would have been a somewhat more familiar sight. Biden was sworn in with a late 19th-century edition of the Douay Rheims translation of the Bible with extensive commentary by Fr. George Leo Haydock, the scion of an old recusant family who spent much of his life serving in Catholic missions in rural England.
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