Battered and bruised by a week of revelations about his health, Joe Biden took comfort in a familiar routine and attended evening mass on Saturday. His slimmed-down motorcade – just two black SUVs – drove up just as the bells at St Joseph’s on the Brandywine, near his Delaware home, finished tolling.

In Joe Biden’s family, there’s a saying that the three worst words anyone can hear are “you have cancer.” One decade ago, his son Beau died from a brain tumor. Several years later, his wife Jill had two cancerous lesions removed in her own brush with the disease.