The Mess Joe Biden Made of Reality

George Weigel also made the point on EWTN the other night that the Immaculate Conception and abortion are not the same thing. That was essentially what Joe Biden claimed when he said the sanctity of human life is a de fide doctrine of the Church, one that he could never dream of imposing on non-Catholics.

“This is deeply incoherent,” Weigel told The World Over host Raymond Arroyo. “And maybe deeply dishonest at a number of levels,” he added.

“Vice President Biden has no problem imposing Obamacare … on the entire society — that’s moral judgment, that’s his judgment being imposed on everyone else,” Weigel pointed out.

“It is absurd,” the John Paul II biographer said, “for anyone at this late stage … to say that the Catholic teaching on abortion –- on the inalienable right to life — is like the Catholic teaching of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary.”

Echoing Paul Ryan’s articulation of his position on abortion during the vice-presidential debate earlier this month, Weigel continued: “Catholic teaching on abortion is based on science; the product of human conception is a human being.” “And,” Weigel added, “the first principle of justice that tells innocent human life deserves the protection of law. You do not have to believe in seven Sacraments to get there. You don’t have to believe in the primacy of the bishop of Rome to get there. This is science and reason.”

“It does a deep disservice both to the faith and the public debate for the vice president of the United States to grotesquely misrepresent the nature of the Church’s teaching like that and to expose his own utterly incoherent position in such a crude way,” Weigel said.

Weigel asserts that this is the “gravest election bearing on the future of the Catholic Church in the United States in my lifetime.”

“The threat to the integrity to the Church and its ability to carry out its educational, charitable, health-care ministries is severe in the extreme,” Weigel said. That is, notably, also contrary to assertions made by the vice president during the debate, claiming that the HHS mandate was no longer a problem, totally ignoring the lawsuits that have been mounting up — from the University of Notre Dame, from evangelical and Baptist colleges, from a lumber company, a HVAC company, and a Protestant Bible publisher, among 100 plaintiffs and counting.

Weigel urged “people to pray,” about the election. “To think carefully. To think for future generations, not just the immediate moment. And to approach voting as an act of moral judgment.” And to do so considering the “nobility” of the vote, that is “often masked by the reality-show character of our politics.” Also voters should approach voting knowing that the Catholic Church this election year is not seeking to impose anything on anyone, but has been “a defender of basic principles of American democracy — including the first freedom, which is religious liberty,” against a newly aggressive “high-culture secularism” on display at the Democratic convention in Charlotte. It’s a secularism that claims that the public space belongs to it exclusively and “that religiously informed moral conviction is a form of irrational bigotry.”

You can watch the full episode of The World Over here: