This election cycle, Rudy Giuliani is the Catholic who’s been getting the most attention — and the most heat.

But there are other Catholics running for president. The Christian Science Monitor in its Monday edition has a fascinating profile of Senator Joseph Biden (D-Del.), who talks candidly about his Catholicism:

Biden says he grew up feeling at home in the church. In the Irish neighborhoods in Scranton, Pa., where he spent most of his weekends, a majority of the kids were Catholic. Neighbors attended mass, and nuns and priests were a respected part of daily life. “Wherever there were nuns, there was home,” he writes in a new book on his life and politics, “Promises to Keep.”

“My idea of self, of family, of community, of the wider world comes straight from my religion. It’s not so much the Bible, the beatitudes, the Ten Commandments, the sacraments, or the prayers I learned. It’s the culture,” he writes.

That comfort zone extended to the Biden family. “At the time that I was going to Catholic school and living in my parents’ home, there was a perfect fit between the theology of the church and the philosophy of my parents,” he told the Monitor.

In the Biden family, children were taught to respect the habit, but not necessarily the person in it. As a boy, Biden took endless ribbing from classmates for a stutter he later overcame. Much of the time, the nuns tried to help. But when a seventh-grade teacher mimicked Bu-bu-bu-bu-bu-Biden’s stutter in front of the class, his mother, Jean, demanded a meeting with the principal and the offending nun. “If you ever speak to my son like that again, I’ll come back and rip that bonnet off your head,” she said. Later, when then-Senator Biden told her he was going to visit the pope, she said: “Don’t you kiss his ring.”

In junior high school, Biden considered, briefly, entering a seminary in Baltimore to become a priest. His mother had other ideas. “I told him: ‘Wait until you start dating girls, then go,’ ” said Mrs. Biden, in a brief conversation after a speech her son gave at the National Press Club Aug. 1. Biden later confirmed the incident. “I can’t believe she told you that,” he says. “My mother thought I had to experience life first, and she was right.”

Biden was one of the first Catholic politicians of the Vatican II generation. From 1962 to 1965, the Vatican Council II produced documents that opened the door to ecumenical dialogue, freedom of religion and conscience, and greater involvement of the laity in affairs of the church, including saying the mass in English and more emphasis on individual Bible study.

“I was raised at a time when the Catholic Church was fertile with new ideas and open discussion about some of the basic social teaching of the Catholic Church,” Biden says. “Questioning was not criticized; it was encouraged.”

He recalls a question in a ninth-grade theology class at Archmere. “How many of you questioned the doctrine of transubstantiation?” the teacher asked, referring to the teaching that the bread and wine change into the body and blood of Christ during the Eucharist. No hands were raised. Finally, Biden raised his. “Well, we have one bright man, at least,” the teacher said.

The teacher didn’t say criticizing the church was good. “He led me to see that if you cannot defend your faith to reason, then you have a problem,” Biden says.

Read the link for much more about Biden’s struggles with his faith, how he coped with the death of his wife, and his feelings about abortion and the war in Iraq.

Photo: Joseph Biden, by Andy Nelson, Christian Science Monitor