Leading Catholics Offer Grim Assessment of Joe Biden’s First 100 Days

Former vice president and Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden meets with clergy me
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Thomas D. Williams, Ph.D.

Prominent Catholic thinkers have handed Joe Biden a failing report card following the president’s first hundred days in office.

Robert Royal, a well-known author and president of the Faith & Reason Institute in Washington, D.C., has compared Biden to the Chinese Communist Party, noting that both talk a lot about the common good while their actions betray it at every turn.

“Catholic Social Doctrine doesn’t simply mean increased spending on progressive social programs,” Royal writes Monday in The Catholic Thing.

Along with urging solidarity, Royal notes, Catholic Social Doctrine “also warns of potential tyranny and demoralization of people and civic institutions when government seek to assume authority over everything – family, faith, morals, even personal attitudes.”

For her part, Grazie Pozo Christie — a medical doctor and policy adviser for The Catholic Association — writes that President Biden eloquently proposed unity as the solution to America’s woes in his inaugural address but has failed miserably to make that a reality.

So many of the actions Biden has taken in his first 100 days “have not built bridges but deepened chasms, and this is especially true of those that defy the core ideals of our faith,” Christie writes in an April 30 essay for National Review.

As usual, Biden’s promotion of abortion rights is front and center in Catholics’ minds.

“Abortion is a clarifying issue because it gives a sharp edge to these and a host of other questions about politics and the moral order,” Royal observes, and on this vital issue Joe Biden holds a position the Catholic Church finds untenable.

“Killing innocent human life is on an entirely different plane” from issues such as immigration or climate or racism, he declares, and even those on the left understand this.

Christie notes that one of Biden’s first actions as president was to rescind the Mexico City Policy, which “prohibits U.S. tax monies from being spent performing or promoting abortions in developing countries.”

“Encouraging poor women to abort their children instead of helping them meet their very real needs is the worst kind of false charity,” she adds. “That a Catholic president should restore funding for abortions overseas as one of his first acts is deeply troubling.”

Domestically, Biden has done much the same, Christie writes, proposing new rules that would send tens of millions in Title X Family Planning grants to abortion providers such as Planned Parenthood.

“It’s hard to see how sending millions of dollars to abortion businesses such as Planned Parenthood fosters the unity Biden touted, not to mention the fact that it contradicts our shared faith’s teaching on the sanctify of all life,” she contends.

The slaughter of the innocents through abortion is happening today to the tune of about 150,000 globally, Royal writes, “the equivalent of killing everyone in Cambridge, Massachusetts plus the entire faculty and staff at Harvard, every day.”

For this reason, he asserts, the American bishops “find themselves at a crossroads,” since to let things go on as they have “would give the impression that they’re just fine with a self-proclaimed ‘devout’ Catholic politician acting this way.”

“If the bishops can rouse themselves to action – as a body would be best, but individually is good too – they might just give the Church on these shores a new spirit,” Royal argues.

“They should also rebut the red herring that they’re engaging in politics by affirming Catholic doctrine,” he states. “Because if they can’t tell some Catholics not to present themselves for Communion, how will they tell anyone anything of consequence?”

As Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League, noted last Friday, there is nothing “right wing” about “addressing public figures who boast of their ‘devout Catholic’ status while constantly undermining what the Church teaches, especially on life and death issues.”

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