During an interview conducted in April 2007 but published in the Wilmington News-Journal for the first time yesterday, Joe Biden was asked how he reconciles his Catholic faith with his position on Roe v. Wade :
It’s very difficult. I was raised as a Catholic, I’m a practicing Catholic, and I’m totally at home with the Catholicism that I was raised in and this whole culture of social responsibility, reaction to abuse of power, the whole notion that there is collective civic responsibility. It’s the Catholic consciousness that I’m totally comfortable with.
The part that gets hard is that I’m of the view that I have trouble viewing termination of pregnancy in terms of choice. Choice makes it sound like, uh, ‘I choose today to go to the market.’ ‘I choose today to terminate my pregnancy.’” It is not choice. It’s always a very, very, very difficult, difficult decision. I know that, my Church has wrestled with this for 2,000 years.
We’ve always believed from the outset that abortion is wrong. But throughout the years, debated the degree to which it is wrong. There are always cases where it is never a first choice. It is always viewed as a dire decision. But throughout the Church’s history, we’ve argued between whether or not it is wrong in every circumstance and the degree of wrong. Catholics have this notion, it’s almost a gradation.
We have mortal sins, venial sins, well, up until Pius IX, there were times when we said, ‘Look, there are circumstances in which it’s wrong but it is not damnation. Along came Pius IX in the 1860s and declared in fine doctrine, this was the first time that it occurred that it was absolute human life and being at the moment of conception.
It’s always been a debate. I take my religion very seriously.
In the speech by Archbishop Chaput which Stefan McDaniel mentioned earlier this morning, the ordinary of Denver argues that “Americans have a very poor sense of history, and that’s very dangerous, because as Thucydides and Machiavelli and Thomas Jefferson have all said, history matters. It matters because the past shapes the present, and the present shapes the future. If American Catholics don’t know history, and especially their own history as Catholics, then somebody else—and usually somebody not very friendly—will create their history for them.” How right he is.
(via Rocco Palmo )
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