Let me also state right away that I have no awareness of the seriousness or absence of Joe Biden’s religious convictions, nor do I have the authority to judge the authenticity of his oft-repeated “devout Catholic” assertion. So therefore, as you might think, I have profound thoughts about the subject. Oh, boy, do I have plenty of thoughts.
But first, as my coworker Becca Lower noted on Saturday, Holy Name College, “an organization of Franciscan Catholic priests and brothers, that have been providing pastoral support to veterans and service members at Walter Reed for almost two decades,” received an order to cease and desist from Walter Reed National Military Healthcare Center’s administrators.
The center, according to Walter Reed, is a “welcoming as well as healing environment that supports and honors a broad range of spiritual, religious, and cultural needs.” Except for the services from Catholic priests a week prior to the celebration of Easter, that is. Archbishop Timothy Broglio, according to Front Page, said in a statement:
“It is incomprehensible that vital pastoral care is being withheld from elderly and sick people when it can be so readily available. This is a great case of the proverb ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.’”
“During Holy Week, in particular, a lack of sufficient Catholic pastoral care creates untold and irreversible harm to hospitalized Catholics, creating a captive community whose religious rights that the government has a constitutional responsibility to provide and to defend.”
Walter Reed is apparently planning to replace the priests by using a government-approved, profitable contractor who will provide Catholic ministry, prompting the archdiocese’s protest.
“The unwillingness to give appropriate pastoral care while granting a contract for Catholic ministering to a pro-profit firm with no means of providing Catholic priests for the medical center is an obvious infringement of service members’ as well as veterans’ Right to Free Exercise of Religion.”
I’m not a theologian and I am not an expert on the Constitution’s guarantee of the right to exercise its freedom of religion, but besides an obvious attempt to appease left-wing anti-Christians just before Easter — and I’m not saying all left-wingers are atheists and anti-Christian — why otherwise would the administration of Joe Biden render the call to expel priests from a United States military hospital?
On Twitter, Rep. Mary Miller (R-Ill.) slammed the Biden administration’s decision:
“Our troops were led by pastors and priests through the darkest days of our most difficult battles. The Biden Administration picked Easter weekend to force Catholic priests to leave Walter Reed, infringing on their First Amendment right to religious freedom.”
“The House will not stand for this.”
Joe Biden may be a “devout Catholic,” but his record reveals he’s also a “progressive” left-winger who never misses an occasion to appease the pro-abortion, anti-Christian audiences — as well as the “gender-affirming” population.
