At a recent abortion rally in Florida, the president was seen making the sign of the cross, invoking God against the mention of Governor Ron DeSantis' (R) six-week abortion ban. Biden went on to tell his handful of fellow abortion supporters that they should hold Donald Trump accountable for the part he has played in protecting preborn babies.
That kind of double mindedness has not escaped the notice of leaders within the Catholic Church.
"Like a number of Catholics, he picks and chooses dimensions of the faith to highlight while ignoring or even contradicting other parts," Washington, D.C.'s Roman Catholic Archbishop Wilton Cardinal Gregory told CBS over the weekend.
"There is a phrase that we have used in the past: a cafeteria Catholic," he added. "You choose that which is attractive and dismiss that which is challenging."
But the Church has stopped short of denying the president communion over his endorsement of things they consider to be mortal sins, including abortion and gender ideology.
Though Bishop Robert Gruss did not address the communion issue at a recent talk in his Saginaw, Michigan diocese, he still did not pull any punches when talking about the president's duplicity.
"I don't have any anger toward the president," he asserted. "I feel sorry for him. He's just stupid. It's not stupidity in the derogatory way; it's just stupidity in the sense of he doesn't know … he doesn't understand the Catholic faith."
Similarly, Cincinnati's Xavier University, the sixth-oldest Catholic and fourth-oldest Jesuit university in the United States, is being called out for the abortion coverage provided in its student health insurance plan.
Michael Hichborn of the Lepanto Institute says the school apparently deleted the part of the policy dealing with elective abortion, but benefits for therapeutic abortion remain.
"It's up to the local ordinary in charge, meaning the local bishop, to step in and to force Xavier University to either strip out that portion of the policy that covers for therapeutic abortions, or lose its Catholic identity," the defender of the Catholic Church contends. "There are no other choices here."
Still, he recognizes that the bishops at various Catholic schools hope this issue will fade into the background.
"My concern is that these bishops don't want to take away their Catholic identity because there's finances involved," Hichborn notes. "As long as they are identified as a Catholic organization, they can also move money between their institutions and these which are calling themselves Catholic but effectively are not."
As long as action is not taken, he says the violators are besmirching the Church and making a lie of what the Church represents.
