No one who has worked in Washington for more than four decades, as I have, can possibly imagine Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., as one of the sharper knives in the drawer. Even in the retrospect of 31 years, his attempt to instruct future-Justice Clarence Thomas in natural law theory during Thomas’s confirmation hearings is still cringe-inducing. He self-destructed in several presidential campaigns because of verbal gaffes (and plagiarism). Any honest telling of his success in gaining the 2020 Democratic nomination will concede that he was more-or-less anointed because of fears that Bernie Sanders, the Vermont socialist who honeymooned in Cold War Moscow, would drive the party over the cliff.
Today, it’s obvious to anyone with the slightest knowledge of geriatric medicine that Mr. Biden is cognitively impaired. So, the burdens of age have been layered onto intellectual incapacity, with the usual Biden bluster becoming a gossamer-thin cover for dysfunction, indiscretion and one malapropism after another. Given these realities, ethicists may debate the degree of Biden’s moral culpability for his relentless pro-abortion politics, which have intensified since the Supreme Court rightly consigned Roe v. Wade to the trash can of jurisprudential history this past June. Objectively speaking, however, Mr. Biden has become not merely an embarrassment to the Church, but a counter-witness to the Gospel the Church proclaims.
Sensing, with other Democrats, that the political winds were blowing in an unfavorable direction as the 2022 midterm elections entered the last lap, the man who brazenly bellows that he will shove his rosary beads down the throat of anyone who questions his Catholic bona fides announced that his first act, should the Democrats control both the House and Senate as of January 2023, would be to legislatively “codify” Roe v. Wade.
In fact, what Mr. Biden and his partisans propose is the most draconian assault on the right-to-life imaginable: a nationwide abortion license that would, in the name of unspecified threats to maternal “health,” legalize the dismemberment of an unborn child until birth. The bill Biden and the Democrats propose leaves the definition of “health” so vague as to countenance the latest of late-term abortions, in cases of “mental health” concerns that could be virtually anything and everything.
By promoting a virtually unrestricted license-to-kill, Mr. Biden has declared himself outside the full communion of the Church. The priests and others who have told this shallow, ill-catechized man that his stance on abortion can be squared with being in full communion with the Catholic Church may well bear the greater burden of moral responsibility — as do the bishops called to exercise pastoral care for Mr. Biden’s soul. But there can be no doubt that, objectively, President Biden has put himself in a position of diminished, defective communion with the Church he loves. The pity of it all is that what he loves he does not know. And love without knowledge is mere sentiment.
Then there is Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, president of the Pontifical Academy for Life. We were, I imagined, friends once. In the mid-1990s, we worked with the late Cardinal William Keeler to have a memorial to Baltimore’s Cardinal James Gibbons erected in the Basilica of Santa Maria in Trastevere, of which then-Msgr. Paglia was the rector. In 1887, Cardinal Gibbons gave a sermon in that venerable basilica, which had just become his Roman “titular” church, that anticipated the Second Vatican Council’s teaching on church-and-state. Keeler and I thought that moment should be commemorated, and Paglia could not have been more helpful in seeing the project through, even suggesting that the Gibbons memorial be paralleled in the basilica’s sanctuary with a memorial to another great defender of religious freedom, Poland’s Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński, now beatified.
But that was then, and this is now. And the archbishop, who has presided over the deconstruction of the Pontifical Academy of Life as Pope Saint John Paul II created it, is not the man I knew some three decades ago. Thus, Archbishop Paglia has recently agreed to the appointment of Professor Mariana Mazzucato, a pro-abortion economist, as a member of the pontifical academy, in the name of “fruitful interdisciplinary, intercultural, and interreligious dialogue.”
This is the most shallow, and indeed duplicitous, nonsense. Shall we now have heretics who deny the divinity of Christ appointed as members of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, in the name of “dialogue”? Or antisemites called to official Vatican positions in the name of a “dialogue” about Judaism?
The mortification of the Church continues. It will strengthen us in the truth, in the end. But it is mortification nonetheless.
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Even Weigel gets something right. Our Holy Church is being mortified but he seems a bit unspoken on the perverse subversion by PF and the lavender gang.
He’s been cagey all along about avoiding a direct criticism of Francis. It would mean admitting he was wrong given his savage attacks on those who criticized Francis early on, and Weigel would rather be tied to the rack than admit to ever have been wrong.
I would suggest that at this late date we should Weigel as we do The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, CNN, MSNBC, and others of their ilk; namely, as a purveyor of propaganda for the shibboleths of the establishment Church in his role as a well-compensated professional Catholic.
I always like George Weigel’s writings but I would agree that he might easily have acknowledged in this piece the undeniable fact that it is Francis who gave us (continues to give us) Paglia and the lavender desecration of the Pontifical Life Institute
Mr. Biden is “cognitively impaired” – A nice way of stating what is painfully obvious.
Knowing that Kamala Harris is up after him, followed by Nancy Pelosi is, quite simply – terrifying.
Hopefully no one will listen to Mazzucato as the fruits of her labor are
barren.
Joe’s diminished faculties and his corrupt soul rightly mortify some Church members. But not all. Joe’s bishop, pope, and his ‘Catholic’ voters and do not.
The Church hierarchy should censure Joe’s sinful hypocrisy. The Church could act to quell the damage. To the extent that the hierarchy ignores Joe’s corruption and fails to support and protect the Truth of Christ shows its weakness, its corruption, its apostasy and worse.
In 2014, The International Theological Commission issued its “Sensus Fidei in the Life of the Church.” Paragraph 3, Introduction: “On the one hand, the sensus fidei refers to the personal capacity of the believer, within the communion of the Church, to discern the truth of faith. On the other hand, the sensus fidei refers to a communal and ecclesial reality: the instinct of faith of the Church herself, by which she recognises her Lord and proclaims his word. The sensus fidei in this sense is reflected in the convergence of the baptised in a lived adhesion to a doctrine of faith or to an element of Christian praxis. This convergence (consensus) plays a vital role in the Church: the consensus fidelium is a sure criterion for determining whether a particular doctrine or practice belongs to the apostolic faith.”
Chapter 4 continues: “Banishing the caricature of an active hierarchy and a passive laity, and in particular the notion of a strict separation between the teaching Church (Ecclesia docens) and the learning Church (Ecclesia discens), the council taught that all the baptised participate in their own proper way in the three offices of Christ as prophet, priest and king. In particular, it taught that Christ fulfills his prophetic office not only by means of the hierarchy but also via the laity.”
We are all responsible for Joe. The crisis of the Church belongs to those with eyes that see and ears that hear. Vatican II said so. When the hierarchy refuses to act, the laity must, else hell perdures. Game On. Mortification is the least of our worries.
meiron, you state that “When the hierarchy refuses to act, the laity must, else Hell perdures.” So I respectfully ask in all sincerity, what actions exactly do you suggest?
Sincerely, do you need to ask? Are you Catholic?
Do you understand the power of God? Do you believe that God makes his power available to his favored servants? Do you believe in prayer? Do you believe that grace is conveyed through the Sacraments? Do you live in the US? Do you vote? Do you believe in Eternal Life? Do you believe that God wants all souls to share His Eternal Life with Him? Sincerely, do you need to ask?
Your caustic and sarcastic reply is noted. That’s unfortunate because it reflects poorly on you and I always enjoy your input. So your roundabout answer is prayer. I’m already doing that. So thank you. In the meantime you might want to work on charity. And yes, I sincerely look forward to your future postings. I always find them enlightening.
This account of Biden’s dysfunctionality and macabre legislative agenda reminds us a bit of the notorious Caligula of Roman history (Emperor succeeding the hated Tiberius, from A.D. 37 t0 41).
It is said that 160,000 animals were sacrificed during three months of festivities following the replacement of the hated Tiberius (almost as many as we have in abortions in any three-month period!).
Caligula built stuff—imperial buildings, two celebrated aqueducts (A “build Rome better” infrastructure agenda!). And because of his extravagance, Caligula faced a financial crisis. Ergo, more taxes and expropriation.
Evidence, too, of insanity or possible medical afflictions, e.g. epilepsy, hyperthyroidism, etc., including systematic murder, and possible sexual perversion of various stripes (!)…
And the claim to divinity…heads were removed from statues to the gods and replaced with his own head (Biden, the defiant hood ornament for today’s heretical/secular church within a Church!). The significant difference today—in the ABCs of Abortion, Biden, and Caligula—might be only prime time vote-buying and teleprompters.
As for Paglia, he paints his own portrait: https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/leading-vatican-archbishop-featured-in-homoerotic-painting-he-commissioned
Peter, Caligula yes!
But also Hitler’s SDP:
Social Democratic Party?
Both Biden and Hitlet approved mutilation of human beings for furthering science and building back better.
Just remember, Mr. Weigel, it was your friends in the Washington establishment who anointed Biden, with the enthusiastic blessing of the likes of Cardinals Cupich, Gregory and Tobin (and I imagine many other hierarchs, including the erstwhile Vicar of Christ). The mortification of the Church runs much deeper than the cognitively-impaired Biden.
And yet, does the Vatican make room for any knowledgable contrarian voices on the environment or do they merely parrot everything the secularists promote?
Is there no means in the USA constitution by which a person «cognitively impaired» cannot be removed from office?
There is something disturbingly monarchic/autocratic about of the office of president.
The incumbent is not God’s anointed, the office not established by divine right.
Benedict XVI abdicated for less.
“Today, it’s obvious to anyone with the slightest knowledge of geriatric medicine that Mr. Biden is cognitively impaired.”
No, George, it was obvious several years ago, to anybody who has ever seen the lapses in orientation, the blank stares, the stammering anger, the anomia and incoherence. The day before the election, Biden was in Philadelphia and was confused about what granddaughter was with him.
Maybe if you penned something like this in March of 2020:
Mr. Biden’s record and his campaign show us no promise of greatness; they promise only the further degradation of our politics and our culture. We urge our fellow Catholics and all our fellow citizens to reject his candidacy for the Presidential election”
Trump had and has his faults, but was not the unmitigated disaster this buffoon is now.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2016/03/donald-trump-catholic-opposition-statement/
If you had any remorse; you would park your pen.
And you and your chattering class, effete snobs made this possible.
Who are we to judge someone who condones late term abortions and letting aborted babies die on the table? Who are we to judge someone who commissions pornography to be graphicly illustrated on the wall of a church? Should grades be eliminated from school curricula?
Thank you Mr. Weigel. You are far more connected than the rest of us, and have so often known what would best be said, and when, to be effective. To me it is a blessing that you can share selected pieces of what you have been privileged to see.
I believe that one purpose, that you had, for this article, was to simply comment on one phenomenon, not a comprehensive discussion of all causes, effects and players. Thank you for sharing this; I look forward to your insights as you write them, and share more of the picture as it becomes digestible.
Thanks again.
Maybe I’m so naive, but I see the opposition to Pope Francis as rooted in American economic nationalism. And, unfortunately, the US economy is tragically tied to war, a reality the pope sees, with much pain, and criticizes — indirectly, but often.
As a religious leader who lived in Argentina through a political regime that used armed force against the people, he is a determined foe of militarism — and militarism has become the heart of US foreign policy.