The looming midterm elections have the Republicans giddy over the potential that they may take control of the House and Senate. Democrats, on the other hand, are hoping to stem the loses knowing that they still have President Joe Biden in the White House.
Amid all this midterm mania are the talking points politicians are pushing in order to appeal to their core voters. Republicans are campaigning on inflation and crime and Democrats on diversity and, of course, abortion following the repeal of Roe v. Wade.
Polls show that voters care more about inflation, but Democrats are hoping that talking up abortion will get out their base. Abortion, however, isn’t just a political issue. As Biden, a practicing Catholic, promises to make abortion a federal right by codifying Roe v. Wade into law should Democrats keep a majority, tension among him and several prominent U.S. bishops has heated up once again.
Some of these bishops have been in the news in the past regarding Biden’s support of abortion, threatening to deny him the sacrament of Holy Communion. It was last week that the issue came to the forefront again.
At least, it come to the forefront in Catholic news publications. In the elite press that GetReligion studies? Not so much or not at all.
This is how Catholic News Agency reported it on Oct. 25:
President Joe Biden, a professed Catholic, must end his “single-minded” abortion extremism and see the humanity in unborn children, the U.S. bishops have said. They said abortion’s impact is “tragic” and urged the president to support mothers.
“The president is gravely wrong to continue to seek every possible avenue to facilitate abortion, instead of using his power to increase support and care to mothers in challenging situations,” Archbishop William Lori of Baltimore, chair of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Committee on Pro-Life Activities, said Oct. 25.
“This single-minded extremism must end, and we implore President Biden to recognize the humanity in preborn children and the genuine life-giving care needed by women in this country,” he said.
The U.S. bishops’ statement noted that last week Biden declared that his top legislative priority after the November elections is to codify a national right to abortion.
This is a major story that was covered by the Catholic press, but big secular newsrooms ignored it.
Why is that? This could be happening for several factors.
First, this type of midterm election coverage could be deemed “helpful” to Republicans at a time when it seems like an increasingly larger bloc of voters are opting to go GOP this election cycle. Latinos and suburban voters, who Biden relied on two years ago, could swing for the Republicans. Many of those voters are also Mass-going Catholics.
As many news organizations appear to be ready to do away with objectivity as a notion, the need for the other side — in this case the bishops — in the never-ending abortion debate may prove an inconvenience. This is what I wrote at the time regarding the Communion issue in May 2021:
It should be noted that secular newsrooms don’t dislike organized religion like many may believe. Instead, they just don’t like religious leaders who attempt to defend traditional dogmas that govern said faith. Therefore, news coverage is often framed this way: Biden can be both “very Catholic” and pro-choice. He’s a good, modern Catholic, not a bad, ancient Catholic.
Another key reason is the news media’s reliance on horse-race election polls — who’s up or who’s down? — with issues a secondary part of the news coverage.
Even though we know that polling isn’t always accurate — pollsters continue to say they are frustrated even during this election cycle — that hasn’t stopped the coverage from relying on it. Knocking on doors, talking to voters and traveling to battleground states is too expensive in an era of tight budgets and newsrooms cuts.
Two days prior to the statements by some bishops, CNA reported the following on retired Archbishop Charles Chaput, the former archbishop of Philadelphia, and what he thinks of Biden:
Archbishop Charles Chaput said … that Joe Biden “is not in communion with the Catholic faith” and that “any priest who now provides Communion to the president participates in his hypocrisy.”
Speaking at a Eucharistic Symposium at the Diocese of Arlington on Oct. 22, the 78-year-old prelate also accused the second Catholic president in the history of the United States of “apostasy on the abortion issue.”
In his address, titled “Do this in Remembrance of Me: Memory, Culture, Sacrament,” the archbishop emeritus of Philadelphia spoke about “American Catholics and our 200-year struggle to fit into mainstream American culture.”
“We succeeded. But in the process, we’ve been digested and bleached out by the culture, rather than leavening it in a fertile way with a distinctive Catholic witness,” Chaput said.
Chaput’s comments were reported and debated, but only in the large ecosystem of the Catholic press.
The National Catholic Reporter, which is on the doctrinal left compared to the EWTN-owned CNA, published a column by Michael Sean Winters, author of the 2008 book, “Left At the Altar: How Democrats Lost The Catholics And How Catholics Can Save The Democrats.” This is what he argues:
The real issue is that Chaput is insulting the vast majority of bishops in the United States who do not subscribe to Chaput’s position on denying Communion on the basis of public policy issues, to say nothing of bishops around the world who scratch their head at this bizarre American idea. They chose to leave this intensely pastoral issue of confronting Catholic politicians whose public stances conflict with church teaching to the local bishop. What does Chaput know about the president's relationship with his local pastor?
Chaput is also, therefore, insulting Washington Cardinal Wilton Gregory, who has explained why he does not deny Communion to politicians based on their public policy positions, which is that he does not wish to politicize the Communion rail.
Finally, of course, Chaput is insulting the Holy Father who reportedly told Biden he is a good Catholic and should continue to go to Communion. The Holy Father also made a point of saying he has never denied Communion to anyone, and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has urged the U.S. bishops to consult with other episcopal conferences about the practice.
It is Chaput, as much as Biden, who is breaking communion with his fellow Catholics. It is Chaput who is creating division within the church.
The pope famously asked: Who am I to judge? Chaput asks instead: Who am I not to judge?
This is a crucial drama that the modern church is going through and the internal battles that have dominated Catholicism since Vatican II.
Frankly, the mainstream press doesn’t care about any of this. It is a religion story within a religion story. The press favors to report on it through a political lens. It is too complicated an issue for them to cover and it doesn’t do Biden any favors.
The bishop-Biden battle is only part of a larger story within Catholicism. These internal battles, in fact, are happening with abortion as a major backdrop. For example, the issue recently ensnared Notre Dame, arguably the most-known Catholic university in the United States. Tamara Kay, a sociology professor at the Keough School of Global Affairs at Notre Dame, had a sign on her office door that said she would provide “information on all healthcare issues and access — confidentially with care and compassion,” according to the independent student newspaper The Irish Rover.
Kay said her actions were done in her capacity as a private citizen and that the school had given her permission. She also called the independent student publication “a rag.”
Again, mainstream newsrooms largely ignored this story. It was covered by conservative-audience news sites such as Fox News.
Sohrab Ahmari, writing in The American Conservative, noted the following:
What the hell is going on at Notre Dame? The short answer is that large swaths of the faculty and administration have traded in the university’s Catholic identity and mission for the pottage of liberal acceptance and prestige. Father John Jenkins, the university’s president, exemplifies the pusillanimity and self-abasement of Notre Dame leaders. In 2009, Jenkins honored the newly elected President Barack Obama, a champion of the culture of death. In 2016, he bestowed American Catholicism’s highest honor, the Laetare Medal, on then-Vice President Joe Biden, another abortion supporter. Hope the liberal head-pats are worth it, Father!
The deeper answer has to do with the generational crisis in Catholic education. In 1967, leading Catholic educators—including then-Notre Dame President Theodore M. Hesburgh—declared themselves free of “authority of whatever kind, lay or clerical, external to the academic community itself,” in what became known as the Land O’Lakes Statement (the position paper was adopted at a gathering in Land O’Lakes, Wisconsin).
This bold casting off of authority ran utterly contrary to the ancient precepts of the Catholic university. Formerly, Catholic education drew on the classical tradition, which held that the educator’s role is to help students learn to love what is lovable and contemn what is hateful or wrong. And it recognized the special role of the Church as humankind’s divinely ordained guide in this regard. Free inquiry and free speech, in this telling, weren’t absolute masters, but servants that had to be carefully restrained to yield good work.
While Ahmari makes his point clear in this opinion piece (in addition to providing great background information to support his arguement), an objective news feature on what’s happening at Notre Dame would make for a wonderful read.
Of course, there is also a Biden connection there. In 2009, the school honored then-President Barack Obama. In 2016, then-Vice President Joe Biden was bestowed the Laetare Medal, American Catholicism’s highest honor, at Notre Dame.
The midterms may be about the economy — gas prices and inflation the big priority — but the abortion debate continues to loom in the background. The debate within the church and Biden’s role as both the president and Catholic makes this a story that the mainstream press may ignore for now, but not over the coming weeks and months.
FIRST IMAGE: President Joe Biden via Wikipedia Commons