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.”
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“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.