The head of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops has publicly reminded the new President Biden that policies he’s pledged to “in the areas of abortion, contraception, marriage, gender ‘would advance moral evils and threaten human life and dignity.’” 

Of course this was too much for Chicago’s Cardinal Blase Cupich, who angrily complained that the USCCB dared to issue this “ill-considered statement on the day of President Biden’s inauguration.”  The cardinal has been a mouthpiece for the Democratic Party, and no doubt thinks that attention on Biden’s lapsed moral positions should be off limits no matter what day it is.  On the excuse that the statement hadn’t first been vetted in committee (where it would certainly have been quashed), the Cupich holds the conference guilty of  "internal institutional failures."  But his real objection to releasing the statement was "that there is seemingly no precedent for doing so, the statement, critical of President Biden, came as a surprise to many bishops, who received it just hours before it was released. ' 

If the USCCB’s statement is both unprecedented and critical, it might be because Biden is only the second Catholic elected president, and his Catholic predecessor, even giving full demerits for JFK’s midnight skinny-dipping with Fiddle and Faddle, was not making frequent, public, and cranky assurances to voters that, once elected, he intended to pursue the most hostile anti-Catholic agenda in American history.  Just as Biden dared black voters not to support him at the risk of their racial identity, Biden dared Catholic voters not to elect him despite his obvious qualifications of personal religiosity and chumminess with the Pope.  At the same time his campaign was protecting Biden from chancing specifics about his policy positions, there was a steady stream of video shots of Biden wryly crossing himself, and irreligious news outlets publishing smarmy profiles taking reverent note of the ever-present rosary in Biden’s pocket and his weekly attendance at Mass.  At the first White House briefing on the evening of the inauguration, press secretary Jen Psaki batted away a legitimate question about Biden’s promise to restore federal funding for abortion with, “’I will take the opportunity to remind all of you that he is a devout Catholic.’” 

But that’s the point: has anyone taken the opportunity to remind Joe Biden about being a devout Catholic?  Archbishop Gomez’s statement may have been his attempt to do that.  

The archbishop’s full statement, in fact, is still the mildest of reminders, watered down as it is with lots of inoffensive blarney.  For instance, it begins with a suitably polite assurance of prayers for “wisdom and courage” for the new president, and an avowal that the Church remains nonpartisan.  Then follows an unfounded reference to “Mr. Biden’s piety,” irksome to observant Catholics because it’s the impiety of Biden’s dedication to things, like enshrining child murder in law, that made an unprecedented statement necessary.  Archbishop Gomez’s declaration concerning Biden’s promised agenda on abortion and gender is commendably unequivocal in itself, but should have been backed up with a demand, respectful but resolute, that obedience to the faith requires him to abandon those policies. 

And why not make the demand?  It’s not unusual that interested institutions make demands on officeholders, especially when they entail fundamental principles.  Black Lives Matter, whose standing is premised on nothing but thoroughly disproven lies, was making demands on Biden as soon as the election was over.  On the other hand, Catholics (like Joe Biden) profess to believe that what the Church teaches was revealed by God Himself.  Why wouldn’t the Church demand Biden’s public adherence to the faith he’s spent a lifetime publicly exploiting? 

In the end there’s no use hoping for “dialogue” with the likes of Catholics like Biden and the arch-hypocrite, Nancy Pelosi.  They’re past dialogue.  For years Pelosi’s contempt for Catholic teaching on abortion has earned her personal warnings by the shepherds of the Church, including her own archbishop and the Pope himself.  Her response was insolence: She knows “’more about having babies than the pope,’” and pro-life Catholics  are “dumb” and “selling out democracy.”  Biden’s arrogation of the celestial station of healer of the nation’s soul is borderline sacrilege.  Only a person whose own soul is in shambles could, without a particle of self-awareness, gush over the nuns who taught him his religion as a child, “those lovely women,” and at the same time vow to wage unconditional war on the Little Sisters of the Poor.

The mildness of Archbishop Gomez’s statement may be explained by the reluctance of today’s bishops to sound dogmatic.  The archbishop may not have noticed how the Left has just recently learned how to proclaim their own most cherished and most destructive positions -- on climate change, on transgenderism, on white supremacy -- as unquestionable, absolute truths, after eons denying that absolute truths even exist.  The dogmatic approach empowers them to enforce acceptance of the received truths by punishing heretics who refuse to profess them and declaring anathema any belief that contradicts them. 

Except the Left is dogmatic and wrong, while the Church is dogmatic and right.  And nothing less than the truth -- stated unequivocally, dogmatically -- will be strong enough to purify an atmosphere so toxic with lies as the one Biden and Pelosi have been inhaling and exhaling most of their lives.  It’s too late for dialogue.  More important, for Biden and Pelosi, who are both visibly declining on the outside and the inside, it could soon be too late for repentance.  For the sake of their souls, they deserve better from the Church than wishes for dialogue.  We all do.

T.R. Clancy looks at the world from Dearborn, Michigan.  You can email him at trclancy@yahoo.com.

Image: Przemek P