(RNS) — President Joe Biden vowed to keep working and praying for resolutions to global conflicts as he addressed the National Prayer Breakfast. He also urged congressional leaders not to treat those with whom they disagree as enemies.
“My prayer, my hope, is we continue to believe our best days are ahead of us, that as a nation we continue to believe in honesty, decency, dignity and respect,” he said in remarks Thursday (Feb. 1) in Statuary Hall in the U.S. Capitol. “We see each other not as enemies but as fellow human beings, each made in the image of God, each precious in his sight.”
The event, sponsored by the National Prayer Breakfast Foundation for the second year on Capitol Hill, follows a tradition that dates to the Eisenhower administration when U.S. presidents began attending the annual event long held on the first Thursday of February.
“We’re all blessed to live in a nation where we can practice our many faiths and practice them freely and where we can come together and lift up our nation and each other — each other — in our own prayers, especially in tough times,” Biden said in remarks carried by C-SPAN2 and CBN News.
As other presidents have, he used the occasion to give thanks for others’ prayers for him even as he described the subject of his own faithful petitions.
Biden said his prayers are with the families of three U.S. service members killed in an attack on Sunday in Jordan at a military base near the Syrian border.
“Not only do we pray for peace, we are actively working for peace, security, dignity for the Israeli people and the Palestinian people,” he said. “I’m engaged in this day and night, working as many of you in this room are, to find the means to bring our hostages home, to ease the humanitarian crisis and to bring peace to Gaza and Israel — an enduring peace with two states for two peoples — just as we worked for peace, security and dignity for the Ukrainian people as they show incredible resolve and resilience against Putin’s aggression. We must continue to help them.”
Biden also described standing against hate — including antisemitism, Islamophobia and discrimination against Arab Americans and South Asian Americans — as a “calling.”
“We’ve never as a nation fully lived up to that and we’ve never walked away from it either,” he said. “It’s a covenant we have with one another to hold this nation together.”
The refashioned National Prayer Breakfast is a scaled-down version of an event that has drawn thousands to the Washington Hilton and was previously hosted by a group often known as “The Family,” but that called itself the International Foundation.
Since last year, there have been two events, one sponsored by the new National Prayer Breakfast Foundation, after years of controversy following the 2018 breakfast and accusations that the gathering of national and international political and religious leaders had become vulnerable to espionage.
