A pro-life Catholic Democrat?! Meet John Bel Edwards

A pro-life Catholic Democrat?! Meet John Bel Edwards November 20, 2019

“Everything that I experienced growing up as a Catholic just pushed me towards service.”

John Bel Edwards was just re-elected the governor of Louisiana. Last year, America magazine taped a lengthy interview with him.

This is worth your time.

Other Democrats: take note.

From the interview: 

He is a man of deep conviction, his friends and family say.

“He lives his values every day,” said his wife, Donna. In many ways, he is just an old-fashioned politician who still puts stock in moral values and not just party loyalty. And Mr. Edwards knows where those values come from. “I know that all of the people that I have been associated with who were strong Catholics, they were public servants in one fashion or another…. Everything that I experienced growing up in Amite as a Catholic just pushed me towards service.”

Amite is one of those Southern towns that resembles an HO-scale model train set—almost too charming to be real. The two-story, early-20th-century downtown; the two-room post office; the sheriff’s car parked in front of City Hall; multiple churches within a square mile and a couple of weathered barbecue joints—Amite’s got it all, a kind of idyllic Southern community at the crossroads of heritage and hospitality. This is the place where John Bel Edwards grew up, met the high school sweetheart he later married, and launched his political career as a state representative.

…It hard to fake the sincerity he conveys when I ask what he learned from his mother about the faith. “I am most appreciative that she taught us how important it is to have an active sacramental life in the Catholic Church,” he says, “especially the Eucharist.”

Then his speech slows and his eyes widen, making that unmistakable face people make when they want you to listen carefully to what they are about to say: “If you believe, as we were taught, that that’s the body, blood, soul and divinity of Jesus Christ [in the Eucharist], then there is nowhere else to go but the Catholic Church. So it’s incredibly important to me to make sure that my wife and I model that for our children. That’s how we were brought into the Catholic faith and why it’s so important to us, both now for ourselves, but especially for our children.”


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