Biden the Sinner
Father William Kelley delivered a blunt message to his parishioners in his homily earlier this month at Holy Trinity Catholic Church in Washington, D.C.: “You may think that we are already a pro-life Church, but, my friends, we are not. In a very real sense. We are only an anti-abortion Church … Our Church also falls short in its self-identification as pro-life because of our disproportionate concerns for life in the womb and our relatively scant concern for the quality of life after birth.”
Sitting in the dark-brown pews that Saturday evening—where the first Roman Catholic president, John F. Kennedy, had once prayed—Joe Biden listened attentively. Father Kelley’s address made an impression on the president. A couple of days later, another Holy Trinity pastor, Kevin Gillespie, was on the golf course waiting for the group up ahead to finish a hole when he checked his phone for messages. He had a missed call from the Biden administration. The president was requesting a copy of the pointed homily. “It ruined my next shot, I was so excited,” Gillespie told me.
For an hour or so each weekend, Biden is just another congregant, a sinner who has imbibed Catholic social teachings over eight decades. But the rest of the
