Biden Pledges To Codify Mass Murder In U.S. Law

By CHRISTOHER MANION

In recent years, America’s Catholic hierarchy has enjoyed an uneasy peace with pro-abortion politicians. Indeed, they were much happier with the political agendas of the pro-abortion Obama Administration than they were with those of pro-life Donald Trump — quickly followed by the mandatory caveat, “except for abortion,” of course.
That uneasy silence continued through the first months of the Biden Administration, but the ice began to thaw last May when San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone publicly applied Canon 915 to U.S. Cong. Nancy Pelosi, a pro-abortion Democrat who lives in his archdiocese.
As speaker of the House, Pelosi is the most prominent of the hundred or so pro-abortion Catholic members of the House and the Senate. In addition, our friend and long-term Congressman Bob Dornan reminds us that over a dozen members of the Biden Cabinet and senior White House staff are also Catholic and pro-abortion.
Nancy Pelosi was not the first politician on Capitol Hill to be barred from Communion by her ordinary — Sen. Dick Durbin (D., Ill.) comes to mind — but the pro-abortion left made her their poster child and generated a wave of outrage at Archbishop Cordileone.
The warm welcome that Pope Francis gave Pelosi in Rome a month later served as a signal to Cordileone’s brother bishops. Only a few of them dared to support him publicly. Even fewer have publicly criticized the pro-abortion politicians residing in their own dioceses.
Joe Biden has taken advantage of this silence by becoming even more strident, even murderous, in his radical support of abortion. Two weeks ago, spiteful at the specter of state pro-life laws post-Dobbs, he pledged to make abortion on demand until birth “the law of the land.”
“Here’s the promise I make to you and the American people,” he said. “The first bill that I will send to Congress will be to codify Roe v. Wade, and when Congress passes it, I will sign it in January, 50 years after Roe was first decided to be the law of the land.”
Biden made this pledge to the desperate members of the Democratic National Committee, who apparently needed some cheering up in view of the dismal prospects for their party’s candidates next week.
But what else could Joe tell them? He knew that he couldn’t feed them the same palaver that makes his media lapdogs wag their tails. Since his diminished mental capacity no longer permits sophistication or nuance, he simply promised to support cold-blooded murder as the party’s number one priority.
And they loved it.

Will Bishops Confront “Catholic Joe” In Baltimore?

Curiously, the uneasy peace between abortion advocates and the bishops works both ways. That unsettling situation was pointed out by Philadelphia Archbishop Charles Chaput, OFM Cap., now retired, who spoke at a Eucharistic Congress in Arlington, Va., two weeks ago.
“We’ve arrived at a moment when many Catholics, even many who regularly attend Sunday Mass, no longer believe in the Real Sacrifice or the Real Presence. We’ve forgotten who we are as a believing people. This is both a cause and a symptom of today’s lukewarm Catholic spirit, in our nation’s culture and within the Church herself,” he said.
Archbishop Chaput’s remarks addressed the question of “American Catholics and our 200-year struggle to fit into mainstream American culture.”
“We succeeded,” he said, “but in the process, we’ve been digested and bleached out by the culture, rather than leavening it in a fertile way with a distinctive Catholic witness. Mr. Biden’s apostasy on the abortion issue is only the most repugnant example. He’s not alone. But in a sane world, his unique public leadership would make — or should make — public consequences unavoidable.”
Here Archbishop Chaput tells a fundamental but forgotten truth: In a “sane world,” Catholics would be joined by the vast majority of society to call abortion the murder that it is. Indeed, until well into the twentieth century, most Americans, and most among our public leadership, agreed.
Archbishop Chaput then addressed the current Catholic conundrum: “When you freely break communion with the Church of Jesus Christ and her teachings, you can’t pretend to be in communion when it’s convenient. That’s a form of lying. Mr. Biden is not in communion with the Catholic faith. And any priest who now provides Communion to the president participates in his hypocrisy.”
In a “sane world,” for years our bishops would have been calling out Catholic leaders who advocate mass murder. Has our hierarchy been “bleached out by the culture”?
To date, few prelates have dared to speak with the clarity of Archbishop Chaput. But where was the outrage — the kind that met Archbishop Cordileone’s application of Canon 915 to Mrs. Pelosi?
There wasn’t any.
In fact, Archbishop Chaput’s comments received scant attention in the secular press. Perhaps the Washington-based media know that Wilton Cardinal Gregory doesn’t agree with Archbishop Chaput, nor does Wilmington Bishop William Koenig of Delaware, where Catholic Joe spends most of his time. Nor do the Jesuits at Georgetown’s Holy Trinity Parish, Joe’s favorite parish in D.C. So why bother?
But should Biden cross the Potomac into Virginia, The Washington Bezos Post’s “very devout Catholic” Joe would confront a decidedly different reception. There, Arlington Bishop Michael Burbidge has already joined the small cohort of ordinaries announcing that they will respect and enforce the order of Nancy Pelosi’s archbishop.
Bishop Burbidge’s congressman, Catholic Gerry Connolly, supports abortion through birth. In fact, the Democrats have followed Biden in making abortion their Prime Mandate nationally, so Gerry (a former colleague of mine on Capitol Hill) has little choice, in spite of his student days in a Maryknoll seminary.
But Gerry must be feeling the heat these days, because last week Bishop Burbidge joined Archbishop Chaput in denouncing Joe Biden’s support of unlimited abortion.
“President Biden recently stated that if the Democratic Party has control of Congress following the November 2022 election, his top priority will be pro-abortion legislation,” Bishop Burbidge wrote. “I condemn abortion and any political tactic that would codify abortion as national policy. Fundamentally, abortion ends the life of a precious child and deeply wounds the child’s mother. The role of Congress is to pass laws that serve the common good — and yet this priority of the president only brings about pain and death.”
Archbishop William E. Lori of Baltimore, chairman of the USCCB’s Committee on Pro-Life Activities, weighed in as well.
“The President is gravely wrong to continue to seek every possible avenue to facilitate abortion, instead of using his power to increase support and care to mothers in challenging situations. This single-minded extremism must end,” he wrote last week.
The USCCB meets in ten days to elect a new president, vice-president, and several committee chairmen. While the results might well prove interesting, the real issues lie beyond personalities and personnel.
Two years ago, the assembled bishops voted to make abortion their “preeminent issue” — and immediately forgot about it.
That intentional amnesia came at a high cost. Will “Catholic Joe” Biden’s Declaration of Total War on the unborn cause them finally to come to their senses?
Will they listen to their colleagues like +Cordileone, +Chaput, +Lori, and +Burbidge — or will they spin their wheels crafting new policies, procedures, programs, and protocols?
Will they finally get their act together and act in unison regarding the 100 pro-abortion members of Congress and the Senate on Capitol Hill?
Or will they continue their tiresome political forays, beating the drum for gun control, amnesty for illegal aliens, and federal funding for their secular NGOs?
For our marching orders, we borrow the language of Bishop Burbidge: Any efforts by our bishops to avoid confrontation with pro-abortion Catholic politicians “should be met with peaceful, active, and staunch opposition from the Catholic faithful and all people of goodwill.”