Ed Condon

Why the Catholic Church won’t excommunicate Joe Biden

Joe Biden (Credit: Getty images)

Following Friday’s decision by the Supreme Court to overturn the 50-year-old decision Roe v. Wade, and determine that legislating the legality and limits of abortion is within the power of state legislatures, some pro-abortion activists have targeted the homes of the court’s justices.

Others have laid the blame, or part of it at least, at the door of the Catholic Church. Demonstrators paraded around St. Patrick’s cathedral in New York, a city where abortion remains legal on demand up to, and including, during birth. Some online groups called for a ‘night of rage’ against church buildings.

It is true that the Catholic Church remains, squarely and unfashionably, of the opinion that the voluntary taking of innocent human life is always a grave sin. This is not, however, an opinion shared by America’s most famous Catholic layman, President Joe Biden, who has demanded Congress act to enshrine abortion through all nine months of pregnancy as a right in federal law. This marks quite a departure from the Joe Biden of the 1990s, who used to parrot the then-standard Democratic line that abortion should be ‘safe, legal and rare.’

San Francisco’s Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone recently barred House Speaker Nancy Pelosi from receiving Holy Communion over her pro-abortion activism. Many now wonder if the American bishops might do something similar with the nation’s Commander-in-Chief, given his resolute commitment not just to support abortion but to fight against those who oppose it.

The real bone of contention between bishops is who and when, if anyone ever, should be denied access to communion

Could the bishops excommunicate Joe Biden? Interesting as the question may be, the answer is a certain ‘no’.

There is no question that Biden rejects the Church’s teaching on the grave immorality of abortion, or of the seriousness of that teaching, even among the notoriously fractious US episcopate.

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