The political ramifications of Joe Biden’s departure from the 2024 presidential election remain unknown, in terms of whether a Democrat or a Republican will be the Oval Office’s next occupant.

But here’s something that is known: Since neither Kamala Harris nor Donald Trump is a Catholic, the continuing scandal of a sitting Catholic president who has continually claimed to be devoutly committed to his faith, yet who has ceaselessly promoted abortion throughout his presidency as his highest political priority, will soon come to an end.

Biden’s scandalous record as president on abortion is a direct and deplorable consequence of the political corruption of Catholic Democrats that began during the 1960s. Until that decade, it was simply inconceivable that any mainstream Catholic politician would ever advocate for “abortion rights,” given that Church teaching has always abhorred abortion as a grave evil. 

But as the nation began to veer sharply leftward on some social issues, in the summer of 1964, the Kennedys — America’s first family of Catholic politicians — huddled in their Hyannisport vacation compound with a group of Catholic priests and academics, seeking an opportunity to tap into the growing pool of liberal-minded voters. These advisers — notably including Jesuit Father Robert Drinan, who would later be elected to Congress and scandalously advocate there in support of legal abortion — told the Kennedy clan that Catholic politicians could support “abortion rights” with a “clear conscience.” These dissenting theologians and academics provided a set of specious arguments that continue to be utilized today in support of their demonstrably false claim that an individual’s “conscience” can trump authoritative Church teaching on this fundamental moral issue. 

Despite the circulation of this abortion disinformation, when Biden was first elected to Congress in 1972, the majority of Catholic Democratic politicians still retained at least some measure of fidelity to what their Church teaches. At that time, for instance, even Ted Kennedy still professed to believe that human life starts at conception. And in the wake of the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, Biden publicly stated as a freshman U.S. senator that he believed the Supreme Court had gone too far in terms of legalizing on-demand abortion. 

However, as their party shifted its collective position by the mid-1980s toward unqualified support for legal abortion, politically ambitious Catholic Democrats moved to align themselves more fully with this new political orthodoxy. They were immensely aided and abetted in this sacrifice of their Catholic moral principles by the notorious speech New York Gov. Mario Cuomo delivered in 1984 at the University of Notre Dame. 

In that speech, Cuomo articulated his “personally opposed-but-politically supportive” stance regarding legal abortion, thereby enlarging the loophole through which Catholic politicians could endorse the medicalized killing of unborn babies in their mothers’ wombs while simultaneously claiming to be deeply committed to their faith.

For his part, until recently, Biden was not so unqualified in his embrace of abortion as other Catholic Democrats such as Nancy Pelosi, the second-most-prominent Catholic Democrat of his generation. While he subscribes to the Cuomo-esque position that “I’m not prepared to impose doctrine that I’m prepared to accept on the rest of [the country],” as he put it in a 2015 interview with America magazine, he stated in the same interview that abortion “is always wrong.” And until 2019, he continued to support the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits direct federal funding of most abortions.

This ambivalence on abortion, however, makes his record as president even more scandalous, not less. In the face of withering attacks from abortion activists at the outset of his presidential candidacy in 2019, he jettisoned his previous support for the Hyde Amendment literally overnight.

And since President Biden was installed in office in January 2021, he has unswervingly pushed for the expansion of legal abortion while transgressing repeatedly against the conscience rights of pro-life medical personnel. So much for “not imposing” doctrine: For our nation’s second Catholic president, that’s only prohibited when it comes to what the Church teaches, not when it comes to imposing the doctrine of “abortion rights” at every conceivable opportunity via draconian executive actions. 

Moreover, Biden has done all of this as president despite his personal knowledge that abortion “is always wrong” — something that can only be true, as he also must know, because every abortion claims the life of a completely defenseless human being. Furthermore, he is fully aware that over the course of his long political career, Pope St. John Paul II, Pope Benedict XVI and, most recently, Pope Francis have all decisively and consistently reiterated the Church’s unalterable opposition to the profound evil of abortion — a papal witness that should have permanently eradicated his misguided belief that supporting legal abortion is an acceptable stance for a faithfully Catholic politician, if indeed Biden ever sincerely believed this.

For any Catholic president, that’s an utterly shameful political legacy. Indeed, it’s a legacy that would have appalled the young Joe Biden himself, before his views on abortion were corrupted, along with so many other members of his generation of political Catholics.