Joe Biden’s campaign to con Catholics, often with the help of their own bishops, paid off. He appears to have scooped up at least half of Catholic voters. In the crucial Rust Belt states, he fared far better with them than Hillary Clinton did.
“It turns out that while Trump stays on par (or better) with the Catholic vote nationwide, the GOP’s share of the Catholic vote has been slowly dropping wherever Catholics are more thickly clustered. Trump’s 8 percentage point drop from 2016 with these voters — especially in the swing states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania — is a continuation of a longstanding trend,” reports the Religion News Service.
Countless bishops told Catholics that they could vote for Biden in “good conscience,” and they did. Many bishops aligned with Pope Francis discouraged Catholics from focusing on differences between Trump and Biden on abortion. Don’t be “single issue” voters, they said.
Now the bishops will reap what they have sown. In the first days of the Biden administration, we will see all of Trump’s pro-life executive orders vanish, along with the protections of religious freedom he extended to conscientious Christian doctors, nurses, and others. The Obama-era assault on the First Amendment will begin anew. The Left is already salivating at the prospect, celebrating the “pain” Christians will feel under a Biden presidency.
Biden has said that he considers “religious freedom” a pretext for “discrimination” and will crush it wherever it conflicts with the goals of liberalism. Recall the corrosive philosophy of secularism that held sway during the Obama–Biden administration. Its commissars, such as Chai Feldblum of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, openly argued for religious discrimination in the name of advancing abortion and reproductive rights. Biden will flood his administration with figures like Feldblum.
Biden’s use of the executive branch to discriminate against Christians will assume even more importance given the resistance he is likely to face in Congress. What he can’t advance legislatively, he will seek to advance through executive fiat and judicial picks. Here, too, Biden will borrow a page from Obama, who managed to stack the courts, in spite of a GOP-held Congress, with ACLU-style judges (Obama got around 350 judges confirmed).
One of those judges, Michael Urbanski of Virginia, famously ruled that in public settings the Ten Commandments should be reduced to the Six Commandments, that is, to the ones that don’t mention God. Urbanski is a preview of the kind of judges Joe Biden will select.
Referring to the collision between Christianity and the Democrats’ invented “rights,” Biden has said that “there is no room for compromise.” That means forcing Christians to violate their consciences and ostracizing them from the federal government if they don’t. Biden will condition any interaction with the federal government on acceptance of the “woke” morality of the Left. The first to suffer under such strictures will be his own Church. A Biden administration, for example, will undoubtedly cut off federal contracts to Catholic agencies that refuse to participate in gay adoption. Kamala Harris, who is as open an anti-Catholic bigot as one can get, is on record saying that membership in the Knights of Columbus disqualifies one from government service.
The bishops clustered around Pope Francis, of course, knew all of this and didn’t care. They not only support Biden’s left-wing politics — days before the election the U.S. bishops’ former chief lobbyist, John Carr, loudly announced his support for Biden — but also Biden’s dissenting theology. They don’t fear the coming restoration of the contraceptive mandate because they don’t support the Church’s teaching on contraception. Nor do they care if Biden leans on Catholic adoption agencies. Fr. James Martin, the leading propagandist for LGBT causes in the Church, whom many of the bishops conspicuously support, recently reiterated his support for gay adoption.
Biden will preside over the most anti-Catholic presidency in American history — not in spite of the bishops but in part because of them. Their silence, rationalizations, and sometimes outright support (Cardinal Joseph Tobin, arguably one of the two most powerful Catholic prelates in the United States, blurted out his partiality to Biden over the “alternative”) paved Biden’s way to the White House. So, too, did the secularization of the Church from within. Biden embodies the very secularized Catholicism that many of the bishops have foisted on the faithful for decades, a secularization most obvious in their own academic institutions. One can only imagine the farces to come, as these “Catholic” institutions garland Biden with honors even as he torments groups like the Little Sisters of the Poor.
Tobin and company licked and polished Biden’s boot while sabotaging Trump, the most stalwart defender of the Church’s freedom since Reagan. Some historians will find this puzzling, but it is not. That the persecution to come under Biden and Harris will have been brought to them by their own bishops, and in some cases with their own votes, is a fitting conclusion to an era of astonishing Catholic decadence.
