Four years ago, this column praised the courage of Archbishop José Gómez of Los Angeles, then-president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), for his Inauguration Day letter to President Joe Biden. In an entirely respectful tone, the archbishop pledged the bishops’ support for the president’s goal of healing our divided country while raising concerns about the abortion license as “a matter of social justice.” Americans, Archbishop Gómez wrote, “cannot ignore the reality that abortion rates are higher among the poor and minorities, and that the procedure is regularly used to eliminate children who would be born with disabilities.”
That letter reflected a deep consensus among the American bishops. Yet the Vatican tried to delay its publication, as did several bishops whose batting averages in USCCB elections consistently fall below the Mendoza Line. Some of those bishops then marked the limits of their collegiality by petulantly and publicly deploring Archbishop Gómez’s letter.
What are those Gómez critics are thinking now?
For President Biden, who threatened to “shove my rosary beads” down the throat of anyone who suggested that his was the party of secularism, led, over the next four years, the most rabidly pro-“choice” administration in American history — with the president as cheerleader-in-chief for an unrestricted, unregulated abortion license, on which he doubled down after the Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs decision consigned a spurious federal “right” to abortion to constitutional oblivion. That cheerleading took many forms; it was grotesquely summed up by Biden’s awarding the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America’s highest civilian honor, to Cecile Richards, longtime chieftain of Planned Parenthood.
But that was not all.
During the Biden administration, gender ideology — a frontal assault on the biblical idea of the human person and a threat to religious freedom — became embedded in virtually all federal agencies. Thus it was no surprise that the administration promoted “Pride Month” and the LGBTQ+ agenda, even as it became empirically demonstrable that “transitioning” did not improve mental health outcomes over time, and that surgical interventions and puberty blockers with gender-dysphoric youngsters deserved condemnation as child abuse.
And that was still not all.
In pursuing an agenda that could be properly described, not simply as “un-Catholic” but as anti-Catholic, President Biden worked hand in hand with another Catholic of the same generation, Nancy Pelosi: who, like many other senior officials, helped hide the president’s cognitive decline from the public — until that deception imploded after Biden’s zombie-like performance in the June 2024 presidential debate. Biden and Pelosi (whose denial that she was involved in the president’s post-debate defenestration suggests deficient Eighth Commandment catechesis during the 1950s at St. Leo’s parish in Baltimore’s Little Italy) then arranged to hand the Democratic nomination to Kamala Harris: who was, if anything, even more fiercely devoted to the deconstruction of the biblical idea of the human person via the abortion license and the LGBTQ+ agenda than Biden and the former House speaker.
I would like to feel pity for the now-former president, but that’s a steep climb. Those who have watched him for decades have long known that Joe Biden is a not-so-bright combination of glibness, ambition and gall, with a tenuous grip on the truth of his own curriculum vitae and zero understanding of Catholic ethics as applied to life issues. That an arrogant belief in his own indispensability led him to put the country at risk by denying the reality of his own incapacities makes pity even harder to come by. It should also be said, however, that some responsibility here may have to be borne by Biden’s pastors in the nation’s capital and in Delaware. Did they make any attempt to appeal to his piety in bringing him to recognize the error of his moral judgments about public policy, or to help him get to grips with his personal circumstances? If not, why not?
As he fades from public view, Joe Biden strikes me as a strange hybrid of pre-conciliar, Last Hurrah-style, ethno-tribal Catholicism and post-conciliar Catholic progressivism. He was an accidental president, nominated because his party gagged at the thought of the Vermont Menshevik, Moscow honeymooner Bernie Sanders, as its presidential candidate. Yet this accidental president, who reached the office he craved long after whatever ability he had to meet its demands had dissipated, did grave damage to Catholic public witness in the United States. He did so at a time when liberal Protestant wokery, evangelical Protestant lust for access to power, and secularist aggressions combined to make a mockery of serious moral reflection in the American public square, and the insights of Catholic social doctrine were sorely needed.
As they still are.
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