With Ashes on His Forehead, Catholic President Biden Gets Asked Why He Supports Abortion
In her supreme wisdom the Catholic Church had taught unswervingly throughout history the immoralities of abortion. “From earliest times, Christians sharply distinguished themselves from surrounding pagan cultures by rejecting abortion and infanticide. The earliest widely used documents of Christian teaching and practice after the New Testament in the 1st and 2nd centuries, the Didache (Teaching of the Twelve Apostles) and Letter of Barnabas, condemned both practices, as did early regional and particular Church councils.”[1] As time progressed science would affirm the Church’s teaching against abortion, that human life begins at conception. Morality and empirical science are both in agreement with each other. It is a human life in the womb and that life is precious and immutable.
Fast-forward thousands of years to modern time. The President of The United States of America (Catholic) was asked by a reporter after receiving his ashes on Ash Wednesday, why he supports abortion. His answer was, “I don’t want to get into a theology debate with you,” then his wife pulled him away, stopping the conversation. This pro-abortion stance held by Joe Biden should come by no surprise. Kathleen Marchetti and David O’Connell in their journal article Catholic Politicians and the Politics reported, “Catholic Democratic Senator Joe Biden had one of the least consistent records on abortion in the entire Senate between 1976-2004.”[2] This begs the question, what theology is there to debate? If the Church has never taught abortion was moral, and the President of America does not have the authority to change her teachings, what ground does he have to prove his point? More important, what effect does this have on the image and understanding of the Catholic Church, when one of the most powerful people in the world, who claims to be Catholic suggests this topic is debatable on a theological front?
The next comment Biden makes is, “I’m not gonna make the judgment for other people.” Clearly, by supporting abortion Biden does make a judgment for other people. The judgment that some other people do not have a right to life and can be murdered if their life is judged as inconvenient to another’s life. By taking this stance Biden not only goes against over two thousand years of Church history, but he also goes against the history of the political party he has been representing for decades. According to Daniel K. Williams in his journal article The Partisan Trajectory of the American Pro-Life Movement: How a Liberal Catholic Campaign Became a Conservative Evangelical Cause, “Many of the Catholics who formed the first anti-abortion organizations in the late 1960s were liberal Democrats who viewed their campaign to save the unborn as a rights-based movement that was fully in keeping with the principles of New Deal and Great Society liberalism.”[3]
[1] https://www.usccb.org/issues-and-action/human-life-and-dignity/abortion/respect-for-unborn-human-life
[2] Marchetti, Kathleen, and David O’Connell. “Catholic Politicians and the Politics of Abortion Position Taking.” Politics and Religion 11, no. 2 (June 2018): 281–308. doi:10.1017/s1755048317000530.
[3] Williams, Daniel K. “The Partisan Trajectory of the American Pro-Life Movement: How a Liberal Catholic Campaign Became a Conservative Evangelical Cause.” Religions 6, no. 2 (June 2015): 1. doi:10.3390/rel6020451.
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