Biden and Francis: The Message We Should Take Away

I’ve been asked many times in recent days what we should take away from Joe Biden’s meeting with Pope Francis. I think we all should be annoyed and insulted.

It’s not so much the significance of the meeting and what was said or wasn’t said. I join with those who say if the pope is going to meet with Biden, they should indeed discuss abortion.

But how about discussing it simply from the perspective of the meaning of public service? The point would be that heads of state — as they both are — have a primary obligation to protect the lives of the people they govern.

Pope Francis understands that. Biden could use a reminder.

Of course, the Biden/Democrat Party approach of saying, “I don’t want to impose my religious views on the rest of the nation — my job as a public official is just to implement the law” is nonsense. Religions also teach you shouldn’t steal, but we don’t say that in the name of religious freedom there should be a right to steal.

We’re not trying to get people to join any particular religion; we’re trying to get them to preserve and protect human rights, and to preserve order in society.

When people like Biden and Nancy Pelosi say they are just abiding by the Constitution and enacting the laws surrounding abortion, they’re lying. They’re not just enforcing the laws regarding abortion; they’re trying to change them, and not in a pro-life direction.

Pelosi just led a vote in the House to pass the most extreme abortion measure ever, a bill that would take away the most commonsense and widely supported regulations and restrictions on abortion.

Nothing in the law requires that.

The Women’s Health Protection Act would remove all restrictions on late-term abortion. Americans support those restrictions.

The act would take away the duty of the abortionist to have to notify the parent of a minor who wants an abortion. Americans want to have those kind of parental involvement laws and have enacted them through constitutional lawmaking processes.

Merely “upholding the law” would suggest leaving that alone.

Pelosi and Biden are not trying to abide by the law; they’re trying to expand abortion in ways that neither the law nor the Constitution require.

But this raises the question, why was it so important for Biden to meet the pope? The answer: Optics. He wanted to be able to say to the world, “Hey everybody, look how chummy I am with the pope.”

He wanted to create the impression, especially among Catholic and Christian voters, that they should support him and say, “Look how religious he is. Look how prayerful he is. Look how Catholic he is.”

That’s an insult to those of us who are Catholic and to all Christians. We try to live the Gospel and we make sacrifices to live out our faith. And then these high-profile Catholics want all the benefit of that while throwing the sacrifice out the window.

Biden was asked not long ago what he thought about the bishops of the Catholic Church in the United States debating on whether he should be allowed to receive communion. He said it should be a private matter.

If he really believes that, then why does he keep commenting about it publicly? Why did he run campaign ads that show him with his rosary beads?

We do not need a meeting with the pope to establish what Catholic teaching is on abortion or whether Biden has departed from it. Pope Francis has been very clear: Abortion is murder, and going to an abortionist is like hiring a hitman.

Pope Francis has spoken out more forcefully against abortion than most of the bishops. But it’s not the pope who decides what the Catholic teaching is on abortion, and it’s certainly not Joe Biden!

Biden and his spin machine, moreover, want us to think we can separate the abortion issue from the areas in which Biden does agree with the church, and seal abortion away in a box.

But that’s not possible.

The abortion debate takes us to the heart and core of every issue. It’s the right to life that makes matters like poverty and health care and peace issues in the first place. We’re talking about the most fundamental right, without which no other right can be enjoyed.

Whether abortion was discussed or not at Biden’s meeting with the pope is not the point. The point is, when you reject the right to life and the need to protect it, you have, in the words of the U.S. bishops, “rendered suspect” your position on other issues (Living the Gospel of Life, 1998), and, in the words of St. John Paul II, made your cry for human rights in other arenas “false and illusory” (Christifideles Laici, 1988).

Yes, this meeting of Biden and Francis is a teaching moment, but not with the message Biden intended.