By Susan Brinkmann, OCDS
Staff Writer
Senator Joe Biden has joined House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in misrepresenting the Catholic faith during a Sunday interview on Meet the Press.
During the Sept. 7 interview, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee was asked, as a Roman Catholic, when he believed life began.
“Look, I know when it begins for me,” Senator Biden said, then called the question a “personal and private issue.”
“I’m prepared as a matter of faith to accept that life begins at the moment of conception,” he continued. “But that is my judgment. For me to impose that judgment on everyone else who is equally and maybe even more devout than I am seems to me is inappropriate in a pluralistic society.”
Acording to a report by LifeSiteNews, after watching Biden’s appearance, the Most Rev. Robert C. Morlino, Bishop of the Diocese of Madison, Wisconsin, said he put aside the homily he prepared for Mass that morning and instead addressed Senator Biden’s and Speaker Pelosi’s fallacious remarks about Church teaching on abortion.
During his homily, he noted that Senator Biden doesn’t understand the difference between religious faith and natural law.
“Any human being, regardless of his faith, his religious practice or having no faith, any human being can reason to the fact that human life from conception unto natural death is sacred,” Bishop Morlino said.
“Biology, not faith, not philosophy, not any kind of theology – Biology tells us, science [says], that at the moment of conception there exists a unique individual of the human species.”
“It’s not a matter of what I might believe. What my faith might teach me,” he said. “Sen. Biden has an obligation to know that. And he doesn’t know it.”
Bishop Morlino then criticized politicians for confusing the Catholic faithful by making false, inaccurate or misleading public statements.
“They’re supposed to believe in separation of church and state. They’re violating the separation of church and state by confusing people about what I have an obligation to teach,” he charged.
“Prominent Catholics should not be violating the separation of church and state” by “teaching the wrong thing”, but Pelosi and Biden, in their lack of knowledge and understanding, were “doing precisely that,” the Bishop said.
Bishop Morlino encouraged his listeners to make sure they themselves really understood what the Catholic faith teaches, through the Pope and the bishops, and to offer correction to those who were confused or in error “with love,” because otherwise “we will be lost too.”
Archbishop of Denver Charles J. Chaput and Denver’s auxiliary Bishop James D. Conley issued a letter to the faithful yesterday, titled “Public Servants and Moral Reasoning: A notice to the Catholic community in northern Colorado,” addressing Senator Biden’s comments.
“When Catholics serve on the national stage, their actions and words impact the faith of Catholics around the country. As a result, they open themselves to legitimate scrutiny by local Catholics and local bishops on matters of Catholic belief,” the letter begins.
Referring to Senator Biden’s statement that when life begins is a “personal and private issue,” the bishops stated that “in reality, modern biology knows exactly when human life begins: at the moment of conception. Religion has nothing to do with it.”
Archbishop Chaput also took issue with Biden’s claim that he opposed taxpayer funding for abortions, a fact not supported by the Senator’s voting record.
Earlier this year Biden voted against an amendment sponsored by Sen. David Vitter that would permanently prevent abortion funding with federal Indian Health Service (IHS) funds at Indian health care service facilities.
Biden also voted against the Mexico City Policy, an initiative to prohibit taxpayer funding of groups that promote or perform abortions overseas, in April 2005.
In 2003, Biden voted to repeal the law that prohibits performance of abortions of military base hospitals, which are taxpayer funded.
The Bishops’ letter also pointed out Biden’s “strong support for the 1973 Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade and the false ‘right’ to abortion it enshrines,” and emphasized that this “can’t be excused by any serious Catholic.”
The Bishops concluded the letter saying that “resistance to abortion is a matter of human rights, not religious opinion,” and that a failure to defend innocent life means that “all of us – from senators and members of Congress, to Catholic laypeople in the pews – fail not only as believers and disciples, but also as citizens.”
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