By DEXTER DUGGAN
In less than a full month, two of the world’s most high-profile, most pro-abortion, and most immoral “Catholic” politicians trekked to Vatican City to bask in photos with a papal host who shares their left-wing political priorities.
The Democratic Party’s mentally impaired President Joe Biden and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi darkened Pope Francis’ door in October, but the Pontiff didn’t yank away his welcome mat even though, according to the Pope’s own definition, these were mass murderers of countless defenseless preborn babies.
They didn’t travel across the Atlantic Ocean to express contrition despite their political party of death’s declining reputation.
Francis didn’t issue any public statement rebuking these left-wingers’ unrepentant embrace and promotion of depravity. Biden in fact claimed that the Pope told him he’s a good Catholic who can continue receiving Communion. The Vatican declined to comment, saying this was a private conversation.
However, if Biden was lying, it behooved the Vatican to reveal the truth on this vital matter rather than allow him to misrepresent the Pope about sacrilege. During his long political career, Biden has told bold lie after lie to place himself in a better light. He seems a pathetically insecure man trying to armor himself with falsehood.
If, on the other hand, the Pope somehow believed that despite Biden’s defiant public mortal sins he was worthy to receive the Eucharist, the world deserved a doctrinal explanation. Did the Pope actually decline during private conversation to warn Biden of the grave danger he places his soul in, and of the necessity to stop promoting infant slaughter?
By attaching himself in person to Francis, did Biden believe he’d come off looking better? Or instead, to those Catholics already wary about the Pope’s orthodoxy, would his possible blessing of an unrepentant cruel sinner in the White House pull down on Francis’s reputation?
The Vatican had canceled plans to allow streaming of Biden’s sit-down meeting with the Pope, choosing instead to release only its own edited coverage. Considering some embarrassing moments that the Vatican allowed to remain, a person could wonder what had been left out.
In an amazing remark, Biden claimed that both he and the Pope are considerably younger than their chronological ages. Biden, who turns 79 in November, said he’s 60, and the 84-year-old pope, who turns 85 in December, is 65.
Biden linked this to telling the Pope about black baseball player Satchel Paige, who didn’t make his major-league debut until age 42, in 1948, and died at age 75 in 1982. Biden, with his mind once again wandering through the past, seemed to puzzle the Pope, who better would have addressed Biden’s threatened eternal salvation.
Satchel Paige? It was about as if the Pope had decided to tell Biden about an Argentinian soccer player who died 40 years ago. Such a fellow may have been a great sportsman, but not suited to the context of this meeting.
When Biden entered the White House last January, he already was older than weathered Ronald Reagan when he left it.
If the cognitively impaired, blundering, feeble, nap-hungry Biden actually believes he’s nearly 20 years younger than his calendar age, his bleary mind is even more confused than his critics feared. And more dangerous to the welfare of the U.S. Some people age better than others, but the passing of recent years has been notably cruel to Biden.
Meanwhile, bad Catholic Biden’s wife, Jill, wore a mantilla veil for the Vatican visit, just like any Catholic woman from years ago. But the question these days for the faker Bidens isn’t what’s atop their heads but in their minds.
Why does Biden profess such a desire for the Eucharist even though the Catholic Church that brings the sacrament to him prohibits cooperation in abortion?
The claim that Biden doesn’t want to impose his beliefs on others is rendered downright hilarious as he seeks to impose his beliefs, no matter how damaging, on the entire nation, including throwing people out of their very livelihoods if they don’t follow his medical mandates, plus transforming the U.S. into a socialist system that most people reject.
The secular scientific evidence for protecting the preborn is far plainer than the spots in front of Biden’s bleary eyes, but he’d like you to think that saving these babies amounts to some kind of religious test like requiring the mayor of Jerusalem to believe in the Holy Trinity.
Not so many decades ago, a different Pope had a different reaction to a bad Catholic leftist in his presence.
Posting a strong reminder at Facebook on October 31 about a previous crucial encounter for a Pope, Tom Pauken, a prominent conservative pro-life activist in Texas, wrote: “I remember vividly when Pope John Paul II visited Nicaragua in 1983. It was under the control of the Communist Sandinista regime, and Ernesto Cardenal was among those who greeted the Pope in the receiving line.
“Cardenal was a Catholic priest who was a so-called Christian Marxist and was an official of the Communist regime,” Pauken continued. “John Paul II called Cardenal out publicly and reportedly said ‘get yourself right with the Church.’ Contrast that exchange with that between Francis and Joe Biden days ago at the Vatican.”
News photos from 1983 showed John Paul II wagging his finger at Cardenal kneeling before him to kiss his ring.
How far the U.S. and the Democratic Party have traveled since 1960 — and not in a good direction — when John F. Kennedy was the first Catholic elected president.
Kennedy sought to reassure voters that he wouldn’t let the Pope rule over his politics. Now Biden and Pelosi think the Pope’s political priorities are just fine and packed their bags to get joint photos. But Catholic moral foundations to them are reprehensible, to be kicked aside.
George Neumayr, a senior editor at The American Spectator, posted on October 30: “Kennedy rose to the top of his party by reassuring Democrats that his connection to the Church was religious, not political. Biden rose to the presidency by making it clear to Democrats that his connection to the Church is political, not religious. His pledge might as well have been: I will only listen to the Pope on matters of public policy.”
Neumayr concluded: “Biden’s easy manipulation of the Church is a measure of how much has changed in politics and religion since JFK’s day. The question has shifted from the Church’s influence on politics to the influence of politics on the Church — from the first Catholic president who avoided the Vatican’s advice to the second one who happily exploits it.”
In an October 29 news release, Fr. Frank Pavone, national director of Priests for Life, said in part: “No doubt the Biden administration and the left wing of the world will try to make it seem like these two men are on the same page about just about everything, especially left-wing causes based on mythology. In reality, they have nothing in common when it comes to fighting for human dignity and equality.
“The reason is something Joe Biden would learn if he really did have respect for the Catholic faith and for the popes of the Catholic Church,” Pavone said. “As St. John Paul II made clear in his apostolic exhortation Christifideles laici, when politicians cry out for human rights but do not protect the basic right to life, their positions on other issues are, and I quote, ‘false’ and ‘illusory’. . . .
“No photo ops, smiling gestures and happy talk about this meeting can change that. Nor does the Pope, and much less Biden, get to change what Catholic teaching is about abortion. As Pope Francis himself has said repeatedly, it is murder and it is ‘like hiring a hitman’,” Pavone said. (See opinion article by Pavone on page 5A of this issue of The Wanderer.)
National conservative commentator Quin Hillyer told The Wanderer on November 1: “This Pope is putting within a confusing cloud the entirety of the Church’s teaching about life. The morally mixed messages are extremely disconcerting.”
Seth Leibsohn, a conservative political strategist and talk-radio host at Phoenix-based KKNT (960 AM), told The Wanderer on October 31: “It’s a shame when religion and religious leaders are used by political leaders, or let themselves be used.
“We realize we are in the realm of invention and convenience in religion and politics when a political leader quotes from these meetings selectively, and then finds cover in ‘off the record’ or ‘private conversation’ demurrals when the question and answer is not to political advantage,” he said. “This past week, President Biden got his apostasy vaccine from his Church and its leader, or said he did.
“I would rather a time when religious leaders would not let themselves be used,” Leibsohn said. “I think of how the Pope addressed the U.S. ambassador to the Holy See in 1998, speaking the truths of America’s founding to her, publicly. Truths she likely had not heard in a long time, if ever.
“I think of how Mother Teresa spoke truth to power in 1994 at the [Washington, D.C.] Prayer Breakfast when she told the Clintons not to allow the killing of children and that she would take the ones others didn’t want,” Leibsohn said. “Seems truth and politics, religion and political cover, were in their rightful places back then.
“Now religion and God have been superannuated to political expediencies, just like truth: ‘My God’ or ‘My religion’ have come to mean as much as ‘My truth,’ which is to say exactly this: While acknowledging there is a universal standard to be departed from, the departures can be sanctioned and receive countenance so long as such religious apostasies comport with the political ethic of the day, which is to say progressivism,” he said.
“Religion is, pace Marx, not the opioid of the masses. But it can, pace the strength of progressivism, be made so,” Leibsohn said.
Two Politicians
Mary Ann Kreitzer, who runs the Virginia-based Catholic blog Les Femmes — The Truth, told The Wanderer on November 2: “The timing of the Pope’s meeting with Joe Biden raises my antennae. Here we are on the cusp of an election in Virginia with a vicious pro-abortion Catholic Democrat, Terry McAuliffe, running who makes no bones about his support for sins that cry to Heaven for vengeance.
“Meanwhile, Pope Who-Am-I-to-Judge is laughing and smiling and supposedly telling McAuliffe’s philosophical twin that he’s a good Catholic who can go ahead and receive Communion sacrilegiously,” Kreitzer said. “Did the Pope really say that? The Vatican won’t confirm that he didn’t.
“So now we have two rabidly murderous Democrats (Joe and Nancy) smiling and laughing with a Pope who appears absolutely delighted with them right before a crucial Virginia election. It’s disgusting and pathetic,” Kreitzer said.
“And that doesn’t even get into the ridiculous conversation about Satchel Paige,” she said. “That’s what America’s leader talks about when he has an opportunity to meet the leader of the Catholic world? Pope Francis and Joe Biden are both politicians advancing socialism and destroying the moral fabric of the United States.
“I grieve for poor, battered Lady Liberty, but even more for the poor, battered Bride of Christ,” Kreitzer said.
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