OPINION:
For more than 2,000 years, the Roman Catholic Church has endured as the original and largest Christian denomination in the world and the oldest institution in human history. It has survived war, schism, scandal, and powerful movements to reject Christ’s teaching.
The Biden era has laid bare, however, a weakening core of the Catholic Church in these perilous times. Perhaps it’s tied to the church’s support for the administration’s policies regarding illegal immigration or a loathing of former President Donald Trump. Perhaps it’s just a church that fears the secular left too much to defend the faith as it has done for centuries.
Whatever the reason, the church is paralyzed by the heresy of the nation’s second Catholic president, who is committing crimes against canon law while it fails to act. What should have been a victory for the church has turned into a nightmare.
Faithful Catholics should know that according to church law, President Biden is excommunicated.
Canon 1364 says that heretics are excommunicated latae sententiae — that is, they are automatically excommunicated by their actions. Mr. Biden’s advocacy of left-wing positions denies the fundamental teachings of the church.
Mr. Biden’s rejection of church teaching is also a rejection of the sanctity and indivisibility of the human person. Catholics believe that faith is not separable from one’s actions. Catholicism is a comprehensive worldview that is also fully personal and attached to everything that one does in this life.
The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has placed a special responsibility on public officials, saying that adherence to church teaching requires a “heroic commitment on the part of Catholics who are politicians and other leaders in society.”
Many of today’s Democrats in public life reject the indivisibility of the person. Mr. Biden believes that he can be one person in a pew and another in the Oval Office.
Some would ask whether those Catholics who support some measure of legal abortion are also latae sententiae excommunicated. The answer is no. Such an excommunication requires an action, not merely a belief.
Mr. Biden has not merely held the belief that abortion and transgenderism are acceptable. He has established policies to encourage the commission of these sins. St. Pope John Paul II said that Catholics can work to correct evil, even if that correction is incomplete. Working to increase evils such as sterilization of children or abortion is never acceptable.
Mr. Biden and Catholic Democratic leaders are wrong to suggest that you can be in communion with the Catholic Church personally while advocating abortion, euthanasia, the existence of more than two genders, and other radical policies that are against biblical teaching.
The Biden administration has also been exposed for targeting Catholics with law enforcement, treating them as extremists, and he has continued the Obama-era attacks on the religious freedom of Catholic institutions.
It is increasingly clear that many Catholic Democrats practice a politically convenient Catholic nominalism that’s more for the cameras than truly being a soldier for Christ.
For Mr. Biden’s own good and the good of the faithful, his home bishop, in this case, Cardinal Wilton Gregory of Washington, or Bishop William Koenig, who covers his home diocese in Delaware, should announce publicly that Mr. Biden has incurred excommunication by his actions.
Cardinal Gregory is a political liberal who has offered only tepid criticism of Mr. Biden. Bishop Koenig indicated in 2021 that he would educate Mr. Biden on Catholic teaching about abortion — as if that were necessary — rather than deny him Holy Communion.
Canon law was expanded to empower bishops to publicly excommunicate officials in 1983. Catholics should also be concerned that church leaders have refused to act.
The Vatican is also complicit here in trying not to offend Mr. Biden, Democrats or Catholics generally. In 2021, Cardinal Luis Ladaria of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith told the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops that “it would be misleading if such a statement were to give the impression that abortion and euthanasia alone constitute the only grave matters … that demand the fullest level of accountability.”
What could be graver than leading the largest government apparatus in history, with a global platform for articulating public policy and using it to advance a culture of death and human degradation?
Mr. Biden and his party are now engaged in a reelection campaign that emphasizes abortion access. He, his party and their apparatchiks in the press are doubling down on transgenderism and the legalized sterilization of children. Elements within the Democratic Party support euthanasia, legal prostitution and further eroding the definition of marriage.
His complicity in advancing agendas our savior and his church have warned would lead to the destruction of souls is incontrovertible.
A public announcement of excommunication of a head of state is rare, but it was done for Fidel Castro and Juan Peron, but minor leaders in comparison with Mr. Biden. Precedent and law make clear a case for formal, public excommunication for the good of the president and all faithful Catholics.
Mr. Biden has turned faith into a prop and rejected Christ’s truth for a moral relativism that he tries to veil with the sign of the cross.
Catholics are also charged with being courageous in the face of the world’s whims. Yet Mr. Biden has repeatedly shifted his positions to benefit his own earthly status at the expense of his soul.
Given the church’s retreat from its days as a moral compass willing to challenge secular political leaders, it is likely it will be left to God to judge him.
Mr. Biden’s thirst for power has led to his self-excommunication. He should be branded by all faithful Catholics as a heretic and a threat to the church rather than a devout member of the faith.
It is the least we can do if church leaders are afraid to act.
• Tom Basile is the host of “America Right Now” on Newsmax TV and is a Washington Times columnist.
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