Why Excommunicate Biden Now?

President Joe Biden has been out-front and publicly pro choice for decades. In all that time, the American Catholic bishops have never excommunicated him. 

Now that he is president, they are suddenly making noises about how Joe Biden is causing “scandal” and, for that reason, should be denied the Eucharist. They are huffing and puffing and winding themselves up for a really big political blow in which, at long last, they fire their spiritual cannon at the president. 

In normal circumstances, and if it is handled in a pastoral way that reflects genuine concern for the salvation of the soul of the person in question, I have zero objections to withholding the Eucharist from someone who publicly participates in abortion. 

President Joe Biden is pro choice. He has said so without equivocation. The problem is that he’s been saying so for decades of public life, including decades in the United States Senate, and the bishops did nothing. 

It is only now that he is president that they are making all this noise. I don’t think the bishops have any concern for Joe Biden’s soul. I don’t think they even see him as a human being. I think their motivations are entirely political, and that the politics which motivate them have very little to do with the lives of unborn babies. 

It would be an outrageous abuse on the part of the bishops if they were using the Eucharist as a weapon to try to force a head of state to change public policies. But that is in fact the most positive spin I can put on their behavior in this matter. 

If I thought they were trying to use the Eucharist to force Joe Biden to switch his position on abortion, I still would not support them in what they were doing even though I dearly wish he would do exactly that, for the simple reason that it would be sacrilege. The only way I would support them is if I thought they had real concern for Joe Biden as a human being and were acting out of that. But they aren’t even claiming that as their motivation. 

I would understand, although I would still regard it as sacrilege, if I thought they were trying to use the Eucharist as a weapon to save the lives of unborn babies. But I don’t believe that is what they are doing.  

The bishops aren’t stupid enough to think that the fate of legal abortion is in Joe Biden’s hands. They’re plenty smart enough to know that we have six supposedly pro life justices on the United States Supreme Court. After all, they’ve spent a lot of their moral capital coercing Catholics to back the right wing’s choice of attempted rapists, racists and corrupt corporate shills for the Court to get this majority. 

They sat around with their fingers up their clerical noses while the people they backed for the Supreme Court have gutted the Voting Rights Act, declared that corporations (as opposed to the unborn) are people, and gave billionaires the right to buy our government by spending limitlessly on campaigns. 

The bishops have, despite their much ballyhooed “preferential option for the poor,” consistently backed the billionaire class in their decades-long activities which have almost destroyed this country. I think they are well aware that we should, unless we’ve been lied to, have the votes on the Court to overturn Roe. 

The bishops are attempting to excuse their action against Biden by claiming that Biden’s pro choice stance is causing scandal. That makes me think of Lily Tomlin’s old joke: I try to be cynical, but I can’t keep up.

Do the bishops seriously believe that Joe Biden is the cause of scandal in the Church? Really?

Really???????

Somebody needs to buy the bishops a mirror. They have subjected us to a twenty year … let me repeat that … a twenty-year-long clergy sex abuse scandal of priests and, yes, bishops, raping, molesting and sexually abusing every young person of every description that they could get alone. They’ve raped little boys, little girls, teenagers, and their own seminarians. They’ve engaged in group rapes, gang rapes, repeated rapes and serial sexual predation that goes on as far back as we have records and that circles the globe.

From pole to pole, dateline to dateline, there doesn’t appear to be any Catholic diocese anywhere that is free of sexual predator priests and bishops who will cover for the predators and enable them to continue in their predation. There is also quite a number of prominent bishops and cardinals who have proven to sexual predators themselves. 

That, my friends, is scandal. 

Yet, these same bishops are now trying to sell the idea that mild-mannered, grandfatherly Joe Biden is the cause of scandal in our Church. If causing scandal is cause for excommunication, the bishops need to excommunicate themselves, not Joe Biden. 

I know that there are Catholic bishops who are good and sincere people. I hope that they prevail in this upcoming meeting.