In an interview last week at the online Catholic World Report, Archbishop Joseph R. Naumann was asked, “Mr. Biden professes to be a devout Catholic yet is 100% pro-choice on abortion. How do you think America’s bishops ought to respond to this situation?”
Naumann, chairman of the U.S. Bishop’s Committee on Pro-Life Activities, declared:
I can tell you how this bishop is responding. The president should stop defining himself as a devout Catholic and acknowledge that his view on abortion is contrary to Catholic moral teaching. It would be a more honest approach from him to say he disagreed with his Church on this important issue and that he was acting contrary to Church teaching.
When he says he is a devout Catholic, we bishops have the responsibility to correct him.… He cannot define what it is to be a Catholic and what Catholic moral teaching is.
What he is doing now is usurping the role of the bishops and confusing people. He’s declaring that he’s Catholic [yet he] is going to force people to support abortion through their tax dollars.
The bishops need to correct him, as the president is acting contrary to the Catholic faith.
Naumann was referring to one of Biden’s executive orders that reversed Trump’s Mexico City policy banning U.S. taxpayer funding of foreign groups that perform abortions.
Biden has also withdrawn from the pro-life “Geneva Consensus Declaration,” which stated flatly that there is “no international right to abortion, nor [is there] any international obligation on the part of states to finance or facilitate abortion.”
In addition, Biden has directed the DHS (Department of Health and Human Services) to review Trump’s move to block Title X federal funds from going to Planned Parenthood and other abortion performers.
When Naumann was asked if he would refuse communion to Biden, he said, “I don’t anticipate [Biden] coming to Mass in Kansas and coming up to me to receive Communion … but what he is supporting is a serious evil. I don’t know the disposition of his mind and heart but his act of supporting abortion is wrong.”
He added that Biden shouldn’t put any Catholic bishop in such a position:
Biden doesn’t believe in the church’s teachings on the sanctity of human life, and he should not put the priest in the situation where he has to decide whether or not to allow him to receive the Eucharist.
He should know that after 78 years as a Catholic.
Here is the Catholic Church’s position on abortion, from Part Three, Section Two, Chapter Two, Article 5, paragraph 2258 of its Catechism of the Catholic Church:
Human life is sacred because from its beginning it involves the creative action of God and it remains forever in a special relationship with the Creator, Who is its sole end.
God alone is the Lord of life from its beginning until its end: no one can under any circumstances claim for himself the right directly to destroy an innocent human being.
Biden hasn’t much more time before he’ll have the opportunity to explain his hypocrisy to that very Creator of life.
