Biden administration stirs controversy in clashes with Catholics
Sarah Westwood
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The administration of America’s second Catholic president has spent substantial time recently in high-profile conflicts with Catholic groups or churches.
President Joe Biden’s Pentagon severed ties with Catholic priests that had for years provided services to patients at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. His Justice Department advocated for an activist who attacked a Catholic church to walk free. His Education Department proposed stripping away protections for Catholic student groups on college campuses.
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And in a still-unfolding saga, his FBI was revealed as having plotted to develop sources in traditional Catholic churches to spy on worshipers.
Several of these events unfolded while Biden was touting his Catholic faith in Ireland, where he is spending several days this week touring the country and highlighting his Irish roots.
Biden’s relationship with churchgoing Catholic voters at home has been rocky.
His support for abortion, for example, has strained his credibility in that community and sparked calls for him to be denied communion.
His push for expanding transgender education and medical care to children has alienated Catholics who believe changing one’s gender violates the church’s teachings.
But the latest spate of dust-ups has threatened to create an even deeper rift between Biden and his church as he prepares to launch a presidential campaign in which he is likely to draw on his Catholicism as part of his identity.
Republican lawmakers responded with outrage this week to the discovery that officials in Biden’s Pentagon had sent a “cease and desist” letter during Holy Week — the days leading up to Easter, considered the holiest in the Catholic calendar — to Catholic priests offering services at Walter Reed.
“Defense Health Agency doctors are advocating for minors to receive experimental gender transition procedures, but no one seems to be advocating for the right of our service members and veterans to receive the most important sacraments during this most sacred time of year,” Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) and several other Republican lawmakers wrote to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin on Tuesday.
The lawmakers questioned why the Defense Department decided to cut ties with Holy Name College Friary, the seminary with which the government had contracted for nearly two decades to provide pastoral services at the military hospital, and whether a replacement firm hired to offer pastoral services instead had the capability of providing Catholic priests to Walter Reed.
In the letter, the GOP lawmakers said they had reason to believe the new firm could not make Catholic priests available at the hospital, thereby denying Catholic patients and veterans the ability to practice their religion fully.
The Defense Health Agency did not respond to a request for comment.
But the Archdiocese for Military Services said when the friary’s contract ended just as Holy Week began, only one Catholic Army chaplain remained on duty at the hospital, and he was in the process of leaving the military.
Walter Reed has 244 beds but provides care to more than a million patients a year.
“It is incomprehensible that essential pastoral care is taken away from the sick and the aged when it was so readily available,” Archbishop Timothy Broglio said in a statement last week. “I fear that giving a contract to the lowest bidder overlooked the fact that the bidder cannot provide the necessary service.”
GOP lawmakers also pressed the Biden administration this week on why the FBI had gathered covert information from at least one undercover source, with plans to develop more sources, within Catholic churches in Virginia.
House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) sent a subpoena to FBI Director Chris Wray on Monday after the FBI handed over a limited number of documents showing that the FBI field office in Richmond had formed plans to target ultraconservative Catholic organizations as “new avenues for tripwire and source development” and had looked specifically at “mainline Catholic parishes” as potential hubs of “radicalization.”
This came months after the leak of a controversial FBI memo from the Richmond field office that singled out traditional Catholic churches — including, specifically, those that offer a Latin Mass — as worthy of additional scrutiny due to possible links with violent extremism.
While the FBI distanced itself from the memo earlier this year, the new information revealed by Jordan this week suggests the bureau has considered infiltrating Catholic churches more seriously than was previously known.
Conservatives also reacted angrily to the news this week that a liberal activist who destroyed a statue of the Virgin Mary at a Catholic church in Washington state, scrawled “F*** Catholics” on the walls of the church, and sprayed paint in the face of a church worker was offered a lenient plea deal by Biden’s Justice Department.
The perpetrator launched the attack in retaliation for the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade last summer. The Justice Department recommended the attacker receive no jail time.
That was a significant departure from the way the Biden Justice Department has approached cases involving conservatives who have protested aggressively at pro-abortion rights centers.
The Biden administration sought more than a decade of jail time, for example, in the case of a Catholic activist accused of pushing a Planned Parenthood volunteer after the volunteer allegedly yelled in the face of the Catholic activist’s 12-year-old son.
The assault of a Catholic church worker, however, deserves only three years of probation in the eyes of the Justice Department, according to a report from Fox News this week.
The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops objected late last month to a proposed rule change at the Department of Education that would, the Catholic organization said, strip Catholic student groups of their rights.
The Biden administration had moved earlier this year to reverse a Trump-era rule that bars colleges and universities from withholding funding, access to campus facilities, or any other right from a student group based on its religious beliefs.
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Biden officials argued in a proposed rule change that the protection was “not necessary to protect the First Amendment right to free speech and free exercise of religion” and that it was “unduly burdensome” to ask colleges to investigate claims of religious discrimination.
The Biden administration proposal cited complaints from some colleges and universities that the religious protections “allow religious student groups to discriminate against vulnerable and marginalized students.”