On Thursday 25 January 2021 Joe Biden, the newly elected President of America, rescinded a regulation passed by former President Donald Trump that had barred US foreign aid from being used to perform or promote abortions. The White House issued a statement to justify the reversal of the Trump regulation. It said: “Like memoranda issued by President Clinton and President Obama before him, it [the new regulation] immediately rescinds the global gag-rule so referred to as the Mexico City Policy, which bars international non-profits that provide abortion counseling or referrals from receiving US funding.” 

This raises the question: In doing so was Biden, a convinced and practising Catholic, acting against the specific directions of his religion and, especially, his conscience? Anti-abortion groups immediately issued strident condemnations. One national abortion group said that “... this decision is a dark day for our nation – it will lead lead to more deaths of more children and for that, Joe Biden should be ashamed.” On the other hand, pro-abortion groups lauded the new regulation. One such group said: “It is an important first step to restore access to family planning services and mitigate the damage caused by an administration [Trump’s] that pursued this dangerous policy without regard for its impact.”

Biden is the second Catholic to be elected as President of the US.  Before him we had President John F Kennedy. It was Kennedy who secularised the Catholic consience.  In the 1960 elections serious doubts were raised by his opponents as to whether, as President, he would, in grave issues of conscience, be guided by the teachings of the Catholic Church or act in public interests. Significant concerns were expressed by many about the would-be President’s ideological consistency.  At the end of the electoral campaign this thorny question turned out to be the greatest threat to Kennedy’s election as President.      

Kennedy tried to address the question head on at the famous meeting on 12 September 1960 when addressing the Greater Houston Ministerial Association, a group of distinguished Protestant ministers.  He said: “Because I am a Catholic, and no Catholic has ever been elected president, the real issues in this campaign have been obscured – perhaps deliberately, in some quarters less responsible than this.  So it is apparently necessary for me to state once again not what kind of Church I believe in – for that should be important only to me – but what kind of America I believe in ... I believe in a president whose religious views are his own private affair, neither  imposed by him upon the nation, or imposed by the nation upon him as a condition of holding office ... I am wholly opposed to the state being used by any religious group, Catholic or Protestant, to compel, prohibit, or persecute the free exercise of any other religion.” 

Kennedy continued: “I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish; where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the Pope, the National Council of Churches or any other ecclesiastical source;  where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts   of its officials; and where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act against all.”

Archbishop Charles J Chaput of Denver delivered a talk in March 2010 at Houston Baptist University in which he heavily citicised Kennedy’s speech stating that it was sincere but wrong. Kennedy’s mistake was to tone down his Catholicism by advancing secularism.  Chaput drew attention to Kennedy’s surprising claim that his duties as president would never require him to violate his conscience or violate the national interest. Chaput calls it ideological pragmatism that hijacks one’s conscience.  Kennedy, in order to gain power, set in motion currents of thought that today have made significant headway toward the secularisation of Catholic thought and life, not only in America but also in the world.

Chaput stated that in effect the Houston speech “.. began the project of walling religion away from the process of governance in a new and aggresive way.  It also divided a person’s private beliefs from his or her public duties. And it set ‘the national interest’ over and against ‘outside religious pressure or dictates.”   Biden, by issuing the new regulation on abortion, is only following Kennedy’s path. There are many others, including those in our own midst, who adopt Kennedy’s dualist ideas because they are so convenient in certain difficult circumstances they find themselves in.  

We have seen these acrobatics of conscience being exercised by our own politicians especially when they are examined by MEPs prior to being appointed to some very higħ position in the EU’s structure.  There are several dangerous traps for them – abortion in the top list, immigration, sexual orientation, same sex marriage, and so on. 

In October 2004 EU Commissioner designate for Justice, Freedom and Security Rocco Buttiglione was rejected by the Civil Liberties Committee of the European Parliament because in the Italian Parliament he had referred to homsexuality as a “sin”, expressed his opinion against same-sex marriages and insisted upon the traditonal role of women in the household.  Buttiglione’s failure to be appointed as Commissioner has left many of our own candidates for high office in the EU feeling vulnerable and have sought to shield themselves by following Kennedy’s high-handed strategy of playing with their conscience – a conscience sometimes stretched too far.           

Louis Cilia is a former Permanent Secretary, writer and President National Association of Pensioners