The Danger Of Having A Catholic President
President Biden’s celebrated opposition to the teaching of the Catholic Church leads people to error.
It is a real tragedy that both times the United States has elected a Catholic president, we’ve failed in spectacular fashion to choose an orthodox one.
The truly historic part of President Joe Biden’s election is not that Vice President Kamala Harris is the first woman and person of color to serve in that office, nor that he is the second “Catholic” president, but that Biden is the first “Catholic” president to be openly against Church teaching on the most important and fundamental religio-political issues of the age: marriage, contraception, abortion, gender, and religious liberty.
President Biden should be excommunicated, or in the very least, denied communion for the sake of his own soul and those he affects with his falsity. A “cultural Catholic” like Biden is dangerous. Catholics like him lead souls to error and sin, by signaling that Church teaching is somehow optional or that faith can be a private matter, an assent of the mind or sentiment of the heart, and that Christ doesn’t ask more of us than that.
As Father David Dufresne of St. Mary’s Basilica in Alexandria, Virginia said on a recent Sunday, “It is unthinkably scandalous that President Biden claims to be a devout Catholic, supports, advocates, and wants us to pay for dismembering children on an average of about 3,000 every single day in America. But in my opinion, it is even more scandalous that his bishops have said next to nothing and have done nothing publicly to seek out his repentance and conversion.”
The illusion that this sort of liberal Catholicism is a legitimate expression of the faith has already become the media’s narrative. A New York Times article claimed Biden, in his inaugural speech, “rooted himself and the country in a Christian moral vision that makes room for a pluralistic society…”
Liberal journalists covering the religion beat claim that Biden is somehow “less focused on sexual politics” than his predecessor. This even though he already signed executive orders revoking the Mexico City policy (which prevents federal funding for abortions overseas), has constantly promoted the transgender cause at the expense of women, and has promised to “restore federal funding to Planned Parenthood, repeal the Hyde Amendment, and renew legal action against the Little Sisters of the Poor.”
But, of course, according to the media only people who adhere to sexual ethics are “focused” on sex.
This celebration of Biden’s brand of Catholicism is a candid display of how liberalism is at odds with real religion. A pluralistic society requires a watering down of faith so as to not come head-to-head with any absolute truth. Liberalism demands a privatized faith, the kind that says, “I wouldn’t personally choose to kill my child, but I can’t take that choice away from others” as if to say morality is relative and so should be our laws. It implies that somehow secularism is the obvious default in a free society, and that politics isn’t at root theological. This is ludicrous.
But liberals also like the novelty of touting a Catholic president—it’s how we ended up with the fictional Notre Dame alumnus President Jed Bartlett in The West Wing. You can be “Catholic” as long as you’re not Catholic. You can swear your oath on a Douay-Rheims Bible as long as you don’t believe too much in it. As Edward Condon recently put it, Joe Biden’s public faith is “the mirage of Catholicism, blaring the colors and sounds of religion without pronouncing the inconvenient truths of the faith.”
Just compare the treatment of Amy Coney Barrett’s faith with that of Joe Biden. Both are Catholic, yet one was feared for the authenticity of her faith and the other is now celebrated as “perhaps the most religiously observant commander in chief in half a century.”
Liberalism’s fear of an authentic Catholic in office exists for two main reasons: obedience to authority and sexual conservatism. A Catholic believes the Church was founded by Christ and is protected from error by the Holy Spirit. Thus, it has final authority over every Catholic. A Catholic’s personal interpretation of Scripture or opinion about morals is irrelevant. The Catholic Church is the most visible remaining institution in opposition to contraception. Catholics who are orthodox abide by Church teaching, and are thus conservative when it comes to sex, holding that its natural end is procreation within the confines of marriage. By this, an orthodox Catholic threatens liberalism’s social order, now built on the ‘freedom’ of sexual relativism.
Liberalism worries that a Catholic would impose his worldview on the body politic through temporal power. But I worry that fake Catholics will lead souls to eternal error with their heresy. We need to pray for President Biden’s conversion. Who knows—the Lord may be doing something we cannot see right now, just as I trust he did with President Trump.
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-danger-of-having-a-catholic-president/
