Archbishop slams Biden as a 'cafeteria Catholic' who twists his faith for 'political advantage'

A Roman Catholic archbishop laid into President Joe Biden on Easter Sunday — a holy day the nominally Catholic Democrat alternatively recognized as the "Transgender Day of Visibility."

According to Cardinal Wilton Gregory of the Archdiocese of Washington, Biden is a "cafeteria Catholic" whose political agenda appears to dictate what well-defined dogmas and moral teachings he'll ultimately accept.

Host Ed O'Keefe suggested to his guests, Cardinal Gregory and left-leaning Episcopalian Bishop Mariann Budde, that politics and religion have become especially intertwined in recent years. He then pressed the clerics on "how the two major candidates we have running for president invoke Christianity."

Cardinal Gregory first suggested that politics and religion have always had a "strange affiliation, but it's switched now. Whereas faith used to be the voice, the moral voice, that political people — whether they adhered to everything — they would turn to find the moral compass with faith."

"I think in some cases it's the political world that's beginning to set or claiming to set the moral voice," continued Gregory. "We've switched position. There is a great need, I believe, to place faith in its proper position, which is not necessarily antagonistic to the political arena, but to seize the responsibility of being that guiding principle, that moral light, for our people to turn to."

After Budde took thinly veiled potshots at former President Donald Trump, whom O'Keefe noted earlier had recently taken to selling Bibles, the host broached the matter of the president's religiosity.

"Do you get a sense that [Biden's] regular attendance and adherence to the faith resonates with American Catholics?" asked O'Keefe.

"I would say that he's very sincere about his faith, but like a number of Catholics, he picks and chooses dimensions of the faith to highlight while ignoring or even contradicting other parts," said Gregory. "There is a phrase that we have used in the past, a 'cafeteria Catholic.' You choose that which is attractive and dismiss that which is challenging."

Biden has claimed as recently as February that he is a "practicing Catholic."

Cardinal Gregory further suggested that "there are things, especially in terms of life issues, there are things that [Biden] chooses to ignore, or he uses the current situation as a political pawn rather than saying, 'Look, my church believes this, I'm a good Catholic, I would like to believe this.' Rather than to twist and turn some dimensions of the faith as a political advantage."

Biden's position on abortion, gender ideology, and homosexual unions puts him at odds with Catholic teaching and the church.

Concerning abortion, the church in which Biden claims membership holds that abortion is a grave moral sin and that political leaders have a responsibility to protect the unborn.

" The Catechism of the Catholic Church" clearly states:

• "Human life must be respected and protected absolutely from the moment of conception" (2270);
• "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" (2271);
• "Formal cooperation in an abortion constitutes a grave offense. The Church attaches the canonical penalty of excommunication to this crime against human life" (2272); and
• "The inalienable rights of the person must be recognized and respected by civil society and 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" (2273).

Cardinal Raymond Burke, a canon lawyer and former prefect of the church's highest court, stressed in 2020 that Biden and other leaders who supported abortion should not receive communion, reported the Catholic News Agency.

Burke said that Biden "is not a Catholic in good standing and he should not approach to receive Holy Communion."

"This is not a political statement," continued Burke. "I don't intend to get involved in recommending any candidate for office, but simply to state that a Catholic may not support abortion in any shape or form because it is one of the most grievous sins against human life and has always been considered to be intrinsically evil and therefore to in any way support act is a mortal sin."

Archbishop Charles Chaput, who ran the Archdiocese of Philadelphia until 2020, similarly suggested in 2022 that Biden was "not in communion with the Catholic faith" and warned that "any priest who now provides Communion to the president participates in his hypocrisy."

Biden has not only stood at odds with the church over his support of the slaughter of the unborn. Biden has also been recognized by leftists as a "champion" for the LGBT agenda, which similarly runs afoul of church teaching.

In March 2023, Pope Francis stressed that the gender ideology Biden advances is "one of the most dangerous ideological colonizations" today.

"Why is it dangerous? Because it blurs differences and the value of men and women," said the Roman pontiff. "The question of gender is diluting the differences and making the world the same, all dull, all alike, and that is contrary to the human vocation."

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops also underscored last year that so-called "gender-affirming care" is harmful.

"Any technological intervention that does not accord with the fundamental order of the human person as a unity of body and soul, including the sexual difference inscribed in the body, ultimately does not help but, rather, harms the human person," wrote the bishops in a March 20 doctrinal note titled, "On the Moral Limits to Technological Manipulation of the Human Body."

The Vatican's Congregation for Catholic Education made clear in 2019 that there "is a need to reaffirm the metaphysical roots of sexual difference, as an anthropological refutation of attempts to negate the male-female duality of human nature, from which the family is generated. The denial of this duality not only erases the vision of human beings as the fruit of an act of creation but creates the idea of the human person as a sort of abstraction who 'chooses for himself what his nature is to be ...'"

Despite efforts by LGBT activists inside and outside the Catholic church — including James Martin — to distort the institution's teaching, Pope Francis has underscored that while not a crime, homosexuality is a "sin." The church maintains that homosexual "marriage" remains out of the question.

Biden nevertheless ratified the so-called Respect for Marriage Act.

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops underscored in a Nov. 23, 2022, letter that the act's "rejection of timeless truths about marriage is evident on its face and in its purpose."

For his apparent refusal to accept the Catholic Church's guidance on these moral issues, various Church officials have indicated that Biden has effectively become an apostate.

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