Time.news – It is not just the abortion front that creates an obstacle between Joe Biden and the American Catholic world, that is, the largest religious community in the United States. The right-wing of the Bishops’ Conference increases pressure to arrive at a document that deprives Catholic politicians who have taken sides against the change of the current legislation on the voluntary interruption of pregnancy, including the President himself; the most progressive circles are starting to press for one of the most morally demanding promises of the electoral campaign to be kept from the White House: eliminate the death penalty for federal offenses.
Life is life, always: before birth – starting from conception – and until its natural end. In this regard, the doctrine of the Church is clear as water. Ergo defends it against the pro choice but also against those who, like Donald Trump, in the last mile of his race, however then lost, to be reconfirmed, has pressed on the accelerator of the executions within his competence. And the executioner has resumed work at full capacity.
The question of communion with pro-abortion politicians has been reopened with the announcement that the American Bishops’ Conference was preparing, in its next plenary assembly on June 16, to come out with a document on the matter. The existence of the debate was not taken for granted, but the potential embarrassment was taken for granted.
In recent weeks, in the past few weeks there had been talk of a possible date for a meeting in the Vatican between Biden and Pope Francis, at the end of the tour that will take the President to the G7 in Cornwall and then to Brussels on a visit to NATO and the EU. There is no need for an in-depth look to see how it would be a celebration of multilateralism so dear to Francis and a way to erase from the Pontiff’s face the dark expression that was already printed at the end of the audience with Donald Trump.
The two, Papa and Biden, recently found themselves very close in a third life battle, the one over the suspension of patents on anticovid vaccines. Here Bergoglio, if anything, found a deaf ear in Europe.
The front of the intransigent is growing
In any case, the former Holy Office promptly intervened on the matter in the person of the cardinal prefect, Luis Francisco Ladaria, to the president of the American bishops Josè Horacio Gomez. “It would be misleading – writes the cardinal – to give the impression that abortion and euthanasia alone constitute the only serious questions of Catholic moral and social teaching that require the intervention of the Church”.
Pope Francis together with the President of the United States Donald Trump and his wife Melania, on the occasion of a meeting in the Vatican (Afp)
Above all, what Ratzinger once said, predecessor of Ladaria to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and of Bergoglio to the chair of Peter is valid. That is to say: do not throw yourself into easy excommunications, especially if there is no unity of views within the body of American bishops. There was not then, there is not today: sit back.
The letter is dated May 7. A week earlier, the archbishop of San Francisco, Salvatore Cordileone, had taken an almost blatant position by placing himself in the ranks of the intransigent. Just in May, then, the archbishop of Madison, in Wisconsin, also lined up alongside Cordileone. Indeed, Monsignor Donald Hying of Cordileone explicitly made the contents of the appeal his own, adding that he wanted to pray for those Catholic but abortionist politicians. And recalling the words of John Paul II: “A nation that kills its children has no future”.
The struggle over the magisterium for life in the United States marks a new qualitative leap, however. The Catholic Mobilizing Network, which among the myriad Catholic pressure groups appears to be among the best organized, has launched a petition to be presented to the White House together with the Ignatian Solidarity Network, asking Biden to ban the death penalty for federal offenses.
On paper, this is something relatively easy, since the Catholic President is also the only one of the successive tenants of the White House to have explicitly campaigned against executions. A position reaffirmed even in full fight for the election against Trump, who instead resorted to the noose 13 times from January to November last year. Something unprecedented.
The petition seems to be a support to the President, but it could be a sign of a breakup. The American Catholic electorate is divided in half between Democrats and Republicans, but it is very consistent. Better not to displease either party: neither at the level of the episcopal conference, nor at the level of public opinion. (
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