Two Catholic cardinals have spoken out against President Joe Biden’s support for abortion, dubbing him a ‘cafeteria Catholic’ and calling for his excommunication. Meanwhile, countless Catholics and Christians hold similar views, refusing to follow Christian teachings on respect for life.
On Easter Sunday, Cardinal Wilton Gregory, the archbishop of Washington, D.C., told CBS’s Face the Nation that many Catholics “pick and choose which elements of the Catholic faith” they want to follow, “while ignoring or even contradicting other parts.” His comments were in response to Biden’s 2024 State of the Union address in which he vowed to implement a national law reminiscent of Roe v. Wade if he wins re-election.
Gregory continued, “There is a phrase that we have used in the past, a ‘cafeteria Catholic,’ [in which] you choose that which is attractive and dismiss that which is challenging…. The issues of life begin at the very beginning. And they conclude at natural death. And you can’t pick and choose. You’re either one who respects life in all of its dimensions, or you have to step aside and say, ‘I’m not pro-life.'”
Likewise, Cardinal Gerhard Müller, the former prefect of the Vatican’s highest doctrine office, recently claimed that efforts to keep abortion legal amount to “infanticide” and that it is unacceptable for anyone declaring themselves to be Catholic to promote the killing of human beings. “The word ‘abortion’ is too much a soft word,” he told LifeSite News. “The reality is killing, a murder of a living person. There’s no right to kill another person. It’s absolutely against the Fifth Commandment.”
Does ‘free will’ make abortion acceptable?
Many so-called ‘Cafeteria Catholics’ and Christians refuse to adhere to Church teachings on issues such as abortion, or other ideas they disagree with — often surrounding sexuality. Some believe they can hold ‘personally pro-life’ beliefs while refusing to take any sort of stand in opposition to the mass murder of innocent children, as if this excuses them from responsibility.
One argument that Catholics and Christians who support abortion give to support their acceptance of abortion is that intentional child-killing is acceptable under the “free will” that God gifted to humans.
But this is illogical. If free will makes any given act acceptable, then no laws should exist to prevent or prohibit certain evils from happening. If “free will” makes any act morally acceptable, then acts of violence from child abuse to rape to genocide would fit under this category and would also be morally acceptable.
Catholics and Christians who support abortion also argue that they can be ‘personally opposed’ to abortion, and that they should not ‘impose their beliefs’ on others.
But it isn’t the Church that declares that life begins at fertilization. It is science that both declares it and proves it. The Church teaches that all human life is valuable and that it is wrong to kill innocent human beings. Since science proves that preborn children — from the moment of fertilization — are human beings, and the Scriptures and the Catholic Church teach that it is wrong and unethical to kill innocent human beings, then killing preborn human beings by abortion is therefore wrong and unethical. In addition, since U.S. law prohibits the killing of innocent human beings, and science proves that preborn children are human beings, abortion (the act of intentionally killing a preborn child) should be prohibited.
Imposing beliefs?
A decade ago, in response to some of Biden’s past pro-abortion statements, Archbishop Charles Chaput, now retired, pointed out that “this morally exhausted argument has been going on for 40 years [now 50]. American Catholics have allowed themselves to be bullied into accepting the destruction of more than a million developing unborn children a year while other people have imposed their pro-choice beliefs on American society without any remorse for decades.”
Cafeteria Catholics and Christians of America are shrugging their shoulders and turning a blind eye as children in the womb are being violently murdered. They have failed innocent children with their ‘personally pro-life’ standpoint. They have turned their backs on innocent children in their most vulnerable moments of life.
According to a recent Gallup poll, 68% of Americans consider themselves Christian. If every one of them followed Christian teachings on sex, marriage, and human life, stopped pretending the direct and intentional killing of preborn humans is acceptable based on a flawed idea of ‘free will’, and started acting to protect preborn children, abortion could be abolished.
