This week, President Joe Biden said the following about a proposal by Senator Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) for a nationwide abortion ban after 15 weeks of pregnancy, per the Washington Post:
“Think about what these guys are talking about,” Biden told a Democratic National Committee fundraiser in New York this week. “No exceptions — rape, incest — no exceptions, regardless of age,” he said of the proposed ban. “I happen to be a practicing Roman Catholic,” he added. “My church doesn’t even make that argument now.”
As the Post politely notes, “contrary to Biden’s comment, [Graham] said exceptions could be made ‘in cases of rape, incest or to save the life of the mother.’”
This is hardly the biggest whopper in Biden’s remarks, though. Biden, a practicing Catholic, apparently does not understand the Church’s own view on this matter. The Catechism of the Catholic Church is clarifying:
Human life must be respected and protected absolutely from the moment of conception.
From the first moment of his existence, a human being must be recognized as having the rights of a person – among which is the inviolable right of every innocent being to life.
Since the first century the Church has affirmed the moral evil of every procured abortion.
This teaching has not changed and remains unchangeable.
Direct abortion, that is to say, abortion willed either as an end or a means, is gravely contrary to the moral law. . . .
Formal cooperation in an abortion constitutes a grave offense.
The Catechism adds that “the inalienable right to life of every innocent human individual is a constitutive element of a civil society and its legislation.” Quoting another Church document, it continues (citations omitted):
“The inalienable rights of the person must be recognized and respected by civil society and the political authority. These human rights depend neither on single individuals nor on parents; nor do they represent a concession made by society and the state; they belong to human nature and are inherent in the person by virtue of the creative act from which the person took his origin. Among such fundamental rights one should mention in this regard every human being’s right to life and physical integrity from the moment of conception until death.”
“The moment a positive law deprives a category of human beings of the protection which civil legislation ought to accord them, the state is denying the equality of all before the law. When the state does not place its power at the service of the rights of each citizen, and in particular of the more vulnerable, the very foundations of a state based on law are undermined. . . .
As a consequence of the respect and protection which must be ensured for the unborn child from the moment of conception, the law must provide appropriate penal sanctions for every deliberate violation of the child’s rights.”
Biden, it seems, could use the same refresher that Joe Scarborough needed, and that Joseph Capizzi, professor of moral theology at the Catholic University of America provided in our pages:
The Catechism of the Catholic Church states: “Since the first century the Church has affirmed the moral evil of every procured abortion. This teaching has not changed and remains unchangeable.” The Didache, written by Jewish Christians just decades after Jesus’s death, condemned abortion and infanticide. The communities organizing themselves around Christ shared the conviction that life is sacred at every stage of development. That conviction has remained constant over two millennia.
There are, unfortunately, many such misconceptions circulating about what Catholics believe. Which is why Capizzi is part (and so am I) of a new effort, centered on CUA’s Institute for Human Ecology (IHE), to clarify and reinvigorate Catholic life in the public square. As Andrea Picciotti-Bayer, IHE’s director of strategy, notes in the Wall Street Journal, “in a misguided attempt to reconcile Catholicism with modernity, many American Catholics have begun to embrace progressive ideologies that Archbishop José Gómez of Los Angeles calls ‘profoundly atheistic.’” Alas, some of them even promote abortion, perhaps inspired by the example of politicians such as Biden.
As Picciotti-Bayer notes, however, Biden-esque milquetoastery is not the only threat to a viable, vibrant Catholicism in American public life. There are also those who call themselves, variously, “integralists,” “common-good constitutionalists,” or “postliberals,” and:
Their central contention is that contemporary American culture is actively corrosive to Catholic teaching, practice and virtue. Some even reject our nation’s founding principles. In practice, they take advantage of widespread economic anxiety to play up the valuable tradition of Catholic critiques of market-worship, while ignoring Catholic teaching on exchange, the danger of socialism and the importance of subsidiarity. Such thinkers want our laws to reflect their own controversial understanding of Catholic teaching, which apparently seeks to create a powerful state that superintends people’s lives.
Both of these alternatives are flawed. We need something better, “a framework for faith in public life that rejects both secularism and sectarianism,” one that draws from the Catholic intellectual tradition to support an active role for Catholics in American civic life. You can learn more about it here.