President Biden, abortion, and unity in the Church
In 1982, Joe Biden, then a U.S. senator representing Delaware and a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, voted in favor of a proposed amendment that would have declared that the Constitution “does not secure a right to abortion.”
At that time, The New York Times reported, “By a vote of 10 to 7, the panel endorsed a measure sponsored by Senator Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah, that seeks to reverse the 1973 Supreme Court decision upholding the right of women to seek abortions.” Senator Biden’s vote in committee allowed the amendment to pass to the floor of the U.S. Senate.
Congress and the states would have been awarded “concurrent power to restrict and prohibit abortion” by the proposed amendment. The National Council of Catholic Bishops praised the vote, calling it “an auspicious event for the cause of the unborn.”
In September 1982, a motion to proceed with the proposed amendment was withdrawn. And in 1983, 10 years after Roe, when Hatch introduced a similar amendment, Biden changed course and voted against it.
Today, President Biden has not only continued his trajectory of 1983, but in the wake of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, he has made the “codification of Roe” a central issue for the midterm elections. Biden recently told an audience of like-minded activists and staffers, “If you care about the right to choose, then you got to vote.” If more Democratic senators and representatives are elected to Congress, the president promised that “the first bill that I will send to the Congress will be to codify Roe v. Wade.”
This editorial board has consistently urged Biden to use his office “to bring the wisdom of Catholic teaching to bear on all aspects of American policy, foreign and domestic.”
In his inaugural address, Biden promised “to restore the soul and to secure the future of America” by bringing about unity. And yet, in 2022, there is no more consensus about the legal status of abortion in the United States than there was in 1983. While it was clear after the Supreme Court decided to overturn Roe that abortion would play a prominent role in the Nov. 8 midterm elections, Biden could have chosen to work toward his Inauguration Day promise to bring together a fractured nation. Sadly, he’s chosen instead to use the lives of the unborn as a wedge to divide us even further with his promise to enshrine the deeply divisive Roe v. Wade decision into law.
After the women and children who suffer from the violence of abortion, the one most afflected by the president’s policies is the Church.
Biden frequently (and admirably) speaks about his Catholic faith. He has offered moving testimonies about how prayer and his belief in God sustained him in the most challenging moments of life. The frequent scenes of the president faithfully attending Sunday Mass are nothing short of laudatory.
But Biden’s obfuscation and misrepresentation of the Church’s teaching on abortion has left his own Church torn and wounded. Rather than uniting his fellow Catholics around the most noble causes, he has allowed himself to be trapped by our broken political discourse. More disappointingly, he has enabled it.
Ecclesial communion — already afflicted by the diseased binary of American politics — is becoming more wounded still by the president’s failure to protect the most vulnerable. On Oct. 22, retired Archbishop Charles Chaput said, “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.” Archbishop Chaput’s words echo the debate of the U.S. bishops last November, as they determined whether to include prescriptive language about politicians and the reception of holy Communion in a hotly debated document on the Eucharist.
The public disunity among members of the Church has become more and more evident, as political platforms have become more and more entrenched. Catholics often feel like the disciples tossed in the storm in the Sea of Galilee.
In such times, we should remember that regardless of how difficult it is to speak the truth — perhaps especially for politicians who are more concerned about winning elections than they are about winning souls for Christ — only the truth unites. Whether lay or ordained, elected officials or ordinary citizens, leaders who clearly and bravely state the Church’s teaching on life will bring unity. Because political jockeying on abortion among Catholic politicians has proven to sow confusion among our deeply divided society over where the Church stands, only the bold, unequivocal pronouncement of the Gospel — the whole Gospel — is the answer.
While we as a society might be divided in myriad ways, President Biden would do well to remember that all of us are united by one unassailable truth: that we are all sons and daughters of the Father, the author of all life — those on the left and those on the right, those who vote and those who do not, those who are born and those who are not yet born. The fact that the nation’s most prominent Catholic continues to ignore the Church’s teaching on abortion makes it all the more important that the Church — that is, all of us who make up the Body of Christ — remains dedicated to defending the dignity and value of all human life.
Our Sunday Visitor Editorial Board: Father Patrick Briscoe, Gretchen R. Crowe, Scott P. Richert, Scott Warden, York Young
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