Biden and the Disunited Catholic Front - The American Spectator | USA News and Politics
Biden and the Disunited Catholic Front
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Joe Biden in virtual meeting with Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, March 1, 2021 (YouTube screenshot)

Joe Biden’s renegade Catholicism is nothing if not bold. It is a distressing and hubristic jumble, an admixture of everything from transgenderism to Marianism. At one moment, Biden is advocating for abortion and dissolving differences between the sexes; in the next moment, he is gushing about Our Lady of Guadalupe and his devotion to the rosary. The media, of course, loves this erratic style of non-threatening religiosity and has rewarded Biden with flattering coverage of his faith. “Not a ‘cardboard politician’: Biden’s faith forges bond with Mexico,” read a recent Reuters headline.

In his virtual meeting with Mexico’s president, the story notes, “Biden, the second Catholic U.S. president, opened his remarks noting that he had ‘paid respects’ to the Virgin of Guadalupe on trips to Mexico, and wore a rosary from her namesake basilica that belonged to his late son.”

The legion of such leftists in the Church makes it easy for Biden and his aides to divide and conquer confused Catholics.

Biden’s Catholic schtick worked. “Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador on Tuesday praised Biden’s openness in the video conference,” reported Reuters. “ ‘From the outset, this confession that he wears a rosary, the mention of the Virgin of Guadalupe,’ Lopez Obrador told a regular news conference.… The Mexican bishops’ conference hailed Biden’s ‘devotion’ to the Lady of Guadalupe, a Virgin Mary figure who, according to legend, appeared to an Aztec man in 1531 a decade after the Spanish conquest of Mexico.”

The Catholic Left is, naturally, aiding and abetting Biden in this con job. The National Catholic Reporter is already beating the drum for Biden to receive honors at Notre Dame. Notre Dame’s notoriously PC President John Jenkins hasn’t ruled that out, saying, “I believe that we can and should welcome elected leaders to our campus, respect what is honorable in their lives and work, while we acknowledge where we disagree. Such an approach, I believe, is entirely consonant with the character of a Catholic university.”

Sister Carol Keehan has endorsed Biden’s openly pro-abortion pick for Health and Human Services Secretary, Xavier Becerra. Keehan is the former head of the Catholic Association of the United States who used to make over a million dollars a year lobbying for Obamacare.

The legion of such leftists in the Church makes it easy for Biden and his aides to divide and conquer confused Catholics. Biden can always find a liberal priest or nun to shill for him. According to the Jesuit Thomas Reese, Biden is not really in favor of abortion. “What he is saying is that he, as president of the United States, cannot impose his views on other people, on people who are not Catholic,” he said.

One expects this kind of sophistry from the Catholic Left, but it is now even coming from Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, or those who speak for him. Last week a remarkable report appeared in which Benedict XVI was quoted as saying of Biden: “It’s true, he’s Catholic and observant. And personally, he is against abortion. But as president, he tends to present himself in continuity with the line of the Democratic Party…. and on gender policy, we still don’t really understand what his position is.”

The quote sounds so fishy some commentators have wondered if it wasn’t invented by one of his aides. In any case, it makes no sense. Biden’s “gender policy” couldn’t be any more explicit. He has been pushing transgenderism since his first day in office and campaigned on the astonishing claim that transgender equality is the “civil rights issue of our time.” Biden’s “Equality Act” threatens, in the name of transgender “rights,” to upend religious institutions across the country. As for Biden’s “personal” opposition to abortion, Biden no longer speaks of that and hasn’t for years. That is a relic of the Mario Cuomo era. Today’s Catholic Democrats wouldn’t dare say that, lest they offend Planned Parenthood.

The treatment of Biden from the highest levels of the Church is exceedingly soft, even as he pursues an aggressively anti-Catholic agenda. In another sign of these times, Cardinal Joseph Tobin of Newark, who during the campaign revealed that he supported Biden over Trump (“I think that a person in good conscience could vote for Mr. Biden … I, frankly, in my own way of thinking have a more difficult time with the other option”), just received a new plum from Pope Francis. Tobin has been added to the powerful Congregation for Bishops, making him one of the chief bishop-makers in America.

George Neumayr
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George Neumayr, a senior editor at The American Spectator, is author most recently of The Biden Deception: Moderate, Opportunist, or the Democrats' Crypto-Socialist?
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