With no end in sight to the federal government shutdown and uncertainty abroad, former President Joe Biden on Sunday said he still believes in the promise of the nation.

“When I was president, I said the most urgent question facing the country is whether democracy is still America’s sacred cause. I think the answer is yes,” Biden, 82, said as he picked up a lifetime achievement award from the Edward M. Kennedy Institute in Dorchester.

“I don’t believe it could ever be anything other than that,” Biden said, according to a statement issued after his remarks to a crowd of some 600 people who gathered at the institute’s Columbia Point headquarters to hear him speak. “It can never be no.’”

Biden, a Delaware Democrat who served for years alongside Kennedy, D-Mass., when both men were in the U

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