Last week, President Biden vigorously defended allowing women to kill their inconvenient unborn children by denouncing the U.S. Supreme Court’s 5-4 refusal to block Texas’s abortion law from going into effect. He went on to accuse the court majority of fomenting “unconstitutional chaos” and to promise his administration would initiate a “whole of government” response to the Texas law.
It’s remarkable that “Sleepy Joe” has worked himself up into such a lather over this. Other concerns might more legitimately qualify for a “whole of government” response, such as his botched withdrawal from Afghanistan or the ongoing crisis at the U.S. outhern border. If nothing else, Biden’s passion for the legalized murder of innocent children reveals his “devout Catholicism” is a cynical sham.
Abortion and Catholicism Cannot Mix
Despite what some modern commentators claim, the Catholic Church’s opposition to abortion has been consistent from its very beginnings. The “Didache,” a first-century Christian instructional text, specifically states “you shall not murder a child by abortion nor kill that which is begotten.” This teaching distinguished Christianity from the pagan culture that surrounded it, a culture that cruelly embraced both abortion and infant exposure as legitimate methods of population control.
Based on this and other texts from scripture and sacred tradition, the “Catechism of the Catholic Church” condemns abortion in no uncertain terms, calling it “gravely contrary to the moral law.” Indeed, the willful murder of the unborn is not only a mortal sin but a serious crime in the eyes of canon law. Based on Canon 1398 of the Code of Canon Law, anyone who procures an abortion or formally cooperates with the procurement of an abortion is subject to excommunication latae sententiae, or “by the very commission of the offense.”
“Formal cooperation,” however, is usually narrowly defined by canonists to include only those directly involved in the abortion process, most notably the mother seeking the abortion and the doctor performing it. This creates a loophole for Catholic politicians who support abortion since, legally speaking, they only “materially cooperate” with the barbaric practice by supporting its legality, expanding its scope, and (in many cases) seeking to fund it through taxpayer efforts. Such legalistic double-speak allows leaders like President Biden to paper over their moral hypocrisy so they can identify as “pro-choice” while “personally opposing” abortion.
Biden’s Cooperation With the Culture of Death
By any objective standard, the president’s material cooperation with this grave evil has gone above and beyond that of previous Catholic Democrats, showing that his “personal opposition” to abortion is hollow at best. After supporting the Hyde Amendment for decades both as a senator and as vice president, he reversed course in 2019 knowing that he needed to call for federal funding for abortion (a policy that a majority of Americans oppose) in order to curry favor with the radicals who now control his party.
Almost as soon as he took the oath of office, President Biden reassured those radicals of the sincerity of his conversion by rescinding the expanded version of the “Mexico City Policy” put in place by President Trump. In last week’s speech attacking the Supreme Court, he revealed that he doesn’t believe human life begins at conception, a convenient flip-flop from the position he took in a 2015 interview with the Jesuit magazine America. His promised “whole of government” response to the Texas law is yet another sign of his “evolution” away from the “safe, legal and rare” thinking of the Clinton era and towards the “shout your abortion” approach now favored by Democrat thought leaders.
President Biden gave no details about what his administration’s response to the Texas law would actually look like, but given his authoritarianism in other areas of public policy, we can expect something more substantial than a mere amicus brief when it is challenged in court. Since the Texas law went into effect on September 1, leftists have stepped up their calls to enshrine abortion in federal law, a move the president has said he supports.
Biden might go even further to protect legalized child murder by attempting to pack the Supreme Court with leftist justices, a strategy that he conspicuously dodged questions about during his campaign. Either of these paths would certainly cement his legacy as the most pro-abortion president in American history.
At Whose Altar Does President Biden Kneel?
Despite all this evidence to the contrary, Biden’s allies in the corporate media continue to tout his religious bona fides whenever and wherever possible. Yet their efforts betray their fundamental misunderstanding of how Catholic doctrine works. “Cafeteria Catholicism,” although certainly popular nowadays, effectively makes all the moral teachings of the church optional, even those that have been part of the faith since its very beginning.
In clearly and consistently advocating the mortal sin of abortion, President Biden has, in the words of St. Thomas Aquinas, “[failed] in his choice of those things wherein he assents to Christ, because he chooses not what Christ really taught, but the suggestions of his own mind,” deifying himself and his individual will. Although Biden may technically remain a Catholic through his baptism and confirmation, one cannot serve both God and Moloch. Obviously, the president has made his choice.
In July, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops announced its intention to issue a teaching letter on the centrality of the Eucharist in the life of the church. Predictably, Catholic Democrats rose up in arms, fearing they might finally be held spiritually accountable for supporting abortion. As the bishops formulate this letter (which is expected in November), they should remember that our country’s most prominent “devout Catholic” is really anything but.
