(LifeSiteNews) — President Joe Biden “ignore[s] or betray[s] the faith all the time” for the sake of power, Archbishop Emeritus of Philadelphia Charles Chaput says of the “Catholic” Democrat leader’s avowed support for unlimited abortion on demand.
Earlier this month, the president demanded in his annual State of the Union Address that Congress “restore the right the Supreme Court took away last year and codify Roe v. Wade to protect every woman’s constitutional right to choose” abortion and vowed that his administration would do “everything we can to protect access to reproductive health care,” a euphemism for abortion.
Speaking with ACI Prensa, a Spanish partner of Catholic News Agency, Chaput answered a question about the challenge to the Catholic Church posed by secularization.
“Secularization is one of those magic words that implies an inevitable social process,” he said. “There’s nothing inevitable about it. People choose it because it’s the easy and materially rewarding path. We all struggle with a desire to imitate ‘the world.’ It’s been a temptation since the devil offered to give the world to Jesus. It’s especially tempting for leaders like bishops and priests in the Church, and politicians in the secular order.”
“Catholic political leaders ignore or betray the faith all the time to please their constituencies and stay in power,” he continued. “Here in our own country, we saw it just recently in the annual State of the Union speech, where a ‘Catholic’ President Biden promised to support full access to abortion at any time. In the synodal process, the temptation will show up — and in some ways, has already shown up — in our trying to make peace with worldly behaviors and beliefs that directly contradict the teachings of Jesus and his Church.”
Biden was actually pro-life early in his political career but grew steadily more pro-abortion as the Democrat Party solidified its position, and today is an absolutist on the issue who opposes any legal limits on the practice and favors forcing taxpayers to subsidize it. A self-described “Catholic” who insists his faith status remains in good standing with Pope Francis, Biden said in 2015 he is “prepared to accept as a matter of faith” that “at the moment of conception there’s human life and being,” but would not “impose” a “rigid” or “precise” view on the issue that is “born out of my faith, on other people who are equally God-fearing, equally as committed to life.”
While liberal Catholics and their secular allies routinely present abortion as just one debatable issue among many of equal moral weight, since the first century A.D. an “unchangeable” teaching of Catholic doctrine on human life has recognized abortion as an intrinsic “moral evil,” complicity in which “constitutes a grave offense” carrying the “canonical penalty of excommunication to this crime against human life.”
Chaput has previously argued that it “give[s] scandal” to allow pro-abortion politicians to continue receiving Holy Communion, by “creating the impression that the moral laws of the Church are optional … Reception of Communion is not a right but a gift and privilege; and on the subject of ‘rights,’ the believing community has a priority right to the integrity of its belief and practice.”
Despite these longstanding principles, Communion for many pro-abortion politicians, such as Biden, former U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin, U.S. Rep. Ted Lieu, and New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy, has largely been allowed to continue in the United States.