Freddy Gray's American Diary

Democratic vice-presidential candidate Joseph Biden takes his Catholic faith seriously. "The next Republican that tells me I'm not religious," he once said. "I'm going to shove my rosary beads down their throat."
Yet, for all Biden's zeal, many Catholics remain unconvinced that he is one of them. He may be a fervent advocate of social justice, but he is also, as the Catholics Against Joe Biden website points out, a committed supporter of abortion rights and stem-cell research.
In trying to justify this contradiction, Biden employs what has been called the "Personally Opposed, But" philosophy. He describes abortion as a "personal and private issue" and insists he doesn't want to "impose" his beliefs on others. Recently, Biden and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi have taken this argument a step further, citing Augustine and Aquinas to suggest that even the Church is undecided over the question of when human life begins. They have both been sharply rebuked by the US episcopacy. But don't expect any public recantations. Biden and Pelosi are good examples of that peculiarly stubborn species: the American pro-choice Catholic politician.
Today, self-described Catholics make up the majority in both chambers of the state legislature: yet Congress shows no sign of embracing a culture of life. Catholic pro-abortionists are typically Democrats, though there are Republicans in their number Rudy Giuliani, the former Mayor of New York and failed presidential candidate, for instance. But the spiritual home of the Catholic pro-choice pol is the party ofJohn F Kennedy. Indeed, JFK set the ideological foundations for antilife Catholicism in his wellknown speech to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association in 1960. when he reassured his sceptical Protestant audience that his faith would never interfere with his politics. His rigid interpretation of the separation of Church and state has been used ever since by pro-choice Catholics in public life.
The Kennedy connection to legalised abortion goes further, however. In 1964, nine years before the Supreme Court ruled that the prohibition of abortion was unconstitutional, campaign advisers for Edward and Robert F Kennedy invited a group of liberal theologians to the family's compound at Hyannis Port to discuss abortion as a political issue. The delegation included Fr Robert Drinan, dean of Boston College Law School, who would later serve as a congressman (before being ordered to stand down by John Paul II) and Fr Richard McCormack, an influential professor at the Jesuit School of Theology in Chicago. They concluded, allegedly, that abortion could be legally acceptable as "the lesser of two evils," a position that the brothers adopted (Ted more so than Bobby) in their election campaigns. Their example has inspired countless other influ ential pro-abortion Christians, such as the Catholic Democratic nominee in 2004, John F Kerry, who named JFK as his political idol. It could be said, therefore, that the Kennedys • the most famous Catholic family in America, did more to advance the cause of legal abortion than any group in US history.
These days, however. support for abortion seems to be politically poisonous. Electoral experts believe that Kerry's pro-abortion views lost him the crucial Catholic vote, and with it the election. And this year the selection of Biden as vice-presidential nominee has been overshadowed by the surprising Republican pick, Sarah PalM, a pro-lifer and a mother of five. Perhaps the proabortion Catholic politician is. like America's love affair with the Kennedys, fading into the past.