Bishop Malooly Responds to Senator Biden's Comments

Most Rev. W. Francis Malooly, Bishop of the Catholic Diocese of Wilmington, responds to statements made by Sen. Joseph Biden published in the October 19, 2008 edition of the News Journal:

October 24, 2008

In his interview with the News Journal published on October 19, 2008, Senator Biden presents a seriously erroneous picture of Catholic teaching on abortion. He says, “I know that my church has wrestled with this for 2,000 years,” and he goes on to claim repeatedly that the Church has a nuanced view of the subject that leaves a great deal of room for uncertainty and debate.

This is simply incorrect. The teaching of the Church is clear and not open to debate. Abortion is a grave sin because it is the wrongful taking of an innocent human life. And the Church has always opposed abortion. The Church received the tradition opposing abortion from Judaism. In the Greco-Roman world the early Christians were identifiable by their rejection of the common practices of abortion and infanticide. The “Didache,” probably the earliest Christian writing apart from the New Testament, explicitly condemns abortion without exceptions. It tells us that there is a “way of life” and a “way of death” and that abortion is a part of the way of death. This has been the consistent teaching of the Church ever since. It was also the position of Protestant reformers without exception. It was the teaching of Pope John XXIII as well as Pope John Paul II. It is the teaching of Pope Benedict XVI and the bishops of the universal Church, including myself as shepherd of this diocese.

Some ancient and medieval theologians did see a difference between early abortions and ones that occurred later in term because under the limited medical knowledge of the time they did not know then what we scientifically know now—that a fetus is a living human being from the time of conception. Nevertheless, they universally condemned all abortions.

And of course we now know that a fetus is a living human being from the very start. Thus abortions take innocent human lives no matter when they occur. Since there is no “gradation” in the Church’s teaching on abortion, there is no way that the medically obsolete division of pregnancy into three trimesters by Roe v. Wade can have any bearing on the rightness or wrongness of abortion. Taking an innocent life in the womb is equally wrong at any stage of pregnancy.

The Declaration of Independence lists as God-given rights life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Life is listed first and it is the principal function of the state to protect the lives of its citizens. This understanding of the state’s primary obligation to protect human life is also fundamental to the Catholic social doctrine to which the Senator points. Without life all other rights are meaningless.

This Sunday all the parishes in the Catholic Diocese of Wilmington will pray the Litany of St. Thomas More, martyr and patron saint of statesmen, politicians and lawyers. In that litany we will ask St. Thomas More to intercede so that all statesmen and politicians may be courageous and effective in their defense and promotion of the sanctity of human life. We hope that Senator Biden will carefully listen to the Church’s 2000 years of testimony on abortion and that he will join in the defense and promotion of the sanctity of life.

Most Rev. W. Francis Malooly
Bishop of the Catholic Diocese of Wilmington

(emphasis added)

Biden: "I'm Not a John Paul [II] Guy"

(Hat tip: Opinionated Catholic and Whispers in the Loggia)

Sen. Biden sticks his foot in it again over abortion, this time dissing the late Holy Father, Pope John Paul II:

... Q: This [abortion] was an issue for John Kerry, do you see this as being an issue for you?

A: I think it's going to be an issue for everybody. Anyone who's a Catholic, a practicing Catholic, this is a dilemma for. There's an expression in law school: hard cases make bad law. These are just very, very, very difficult moral, social and societal choices.

And for me, I am prepared as a senator to say that the framework of Roe v. Wade based upon this imperfect trimester notion captures the gravity of how you should approach this most serious of decisions relating to life and death. First trimester, the state should stay out of it completely because it's a matter of faith, basically, there. Second trimester, there are competing interests, but they're both legitimate to look at. Third trimester, there's an overwhelming burden to say, there isn't a good reason to abort unless it relates to the mother's health. I'm as comfortable as I can be on a really difficult moral dilemma.

To sum it up, as a Catholic, I'm a John XXIII guy, I'm not a Pope John Paul guy.

(emphasis added)

Well, isn't that special? On the bright side, at least he didn't refer to Pope John XXIII as "Pius the XXIII".

Ed Morrissey: "Soviet Document Shows Biden Sold Out Human-Rights Concerns"

In 1979, while Pope John Paul II was travelling to Poland, preaching a message of human rights and inherent human dignity, thereby giving hope to his oppressed people and spelling the beginning of the end of the scourge of Soviet communism, Sen. Joe Biden may have been, according to Soviet-era documents, busy undermining those efforts. Ed Morrissey reports:

According to internal Soviet Union documents from the SALT-2 negotiations in 1979, Joe Biden effectively told Soviet negotiators not to worry about American rhetoric about human-rights concerns. In fact, Biden also told the Soviets that the Senate didn’t really care about European security, but only in giving the appearance of caring about it. Vladimir Bukovsky and Pavel Stroilov parse the dispatch from the deputy head of the International Department of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union for Front Page Magazine ...

***
... Biden and Lugar may have wanted to clear the talks from all other considerations, which might make sense, except for the rhetoric of Biden and Carter on human rights and their criticism of previous administrations for ignoring the issue in past negotiations. Biden and other Democrats would make that same criticism through the Reagan administration, right up to the collapse of the USSR.

If Biden sold out the refuseniks while he and his party screeched about their plight, then he has already demonstrated a lack of resolve and character for higher office. Biden needs to explain himself.

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