President Biden just became the second Roman Catholic to hold the office, and he hasn’t kept his creed from the world.
Biden, his campaign, and scriptwriters for the Democratic National Convention relied heavily on his faith and personal devotion as a method of persuasion leading up to his election. He even quoted St. Augustine in his inaugural address. And so, to make sense of the Biden presidency will be to make sense of a nominally Catholic presidency.
It won’t be a particularly easy or seamless exercise for Catholics in the United States.
Aside from his creed, Biden hasn’t kept his position on abortion from the world either. The president withdrew his support for the Hyde Amendment during this election cycle — a measure that prevents federal funds from going to most abortions. You just can’t win as a Democrat otherwise. He wants to codify Roe v. Wade, having said in October, “The only responsible response to that would be to pass legislation making Roe the law of the land. That’s what I would do.”
Interestingly, no, tragically, the president has moved away from his earlier instincts on this issue. In 1974, after having won his first Senate election in 1972 and after Roe was decided in 1973, he said in an interview, “But when it comes to issues like abortion, amnesty, and acid, I’m about as liberal as your grandmother. I don’t like the Supreme Court decision on abortion. I think it went too far. I don’t think that a woman has the sole right to say what should happen to her body.”
Abortion rights proponents use that exact construction, arguing the inverse: that nobody has a right to say to a woman what should happen to her body. “It is her body. It is her right. It is her decision,” then-Sen. Kamala Harris said in 2019, referring to abortion.
It’s no secret that the Catholic Church teaches abortion to be a grave evil. Biden, by supporting access to it, directly contradicts its moral teaching. The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops has said, “The threat of abortion remains our preeminent priority because it directly attacks life itself.” (Something, I might add, with which more politically liberal Catholics have taken issue as an improper ranking of moral issues.)
It’s disorienting, at the very least, to have such a prominent Catholic figure shrug off this moral teaching in favor of untethered libertinism. It has been divisive enough for the church, this selective treatment of its teachings. And it will be devastating for a Catholic president to use his pen and the bully pulpit to undermine the cause of limiting abortion.
Another explicitly Catholic difficulty arises with Biden’s pick to be secretary of Health and Human Services, California Attorney General Xavier Becerra.
The Little Sisters of the Poor don’t want to fund contraception coverage for employees of the order, believing contraception to be another grave evil. For years, Becerra has been part of the fight that has dragged the sisters back into court, again and again, to force them and other organizations to violate their own consciences and the tenets of their faith. Biden, for his part, sides with Becerra’s position in favor of the contraception mandate over the Sisters’ position in favor of conscience.
Where non-Biden-supporting Catholics point to abortion and the contraception mandate, pro-Biden Catholics point to his opposition to the death penalty (see the development of the church’s teaching here) and support for just treatment of refugees and the poor.
All of these issues are explicitly related to Catholic moral concerns. Their political expressions have been at the center of our deep cultural divisions and, by extension, at the center of divisions among the faithful.
For that, and for Biden, the story of this presidency and the story of American Catholicism are linked.
