(LifeSiteNews) — LifeSite journalist Frank Wright once again joins Father Charles Murr and John-Henry Westen on this week’s episode of Faith & Reason, in which they discuss President Joe Biden making the sign of the cross at a pro-abortion rally, Jesuit priest Thomas Reese retweeting an ad claiming Biden is God’s choice for president, Bishop Joseph Strickland’s letter about a lack of supernatural faith among clergy, and more.
President Joe Biden was recently caught on camera making the sign of the cross at a pro-abortion rally in Florida. The rally was organized to protest abortion restrictions put in place by the state’s Republican Governor Ron DeSantis. Biden is seen making the sign of the cross in an apparent reaction to a speaker saying that “15 weeks wasn’t good enough; we had to go to six weeks,” referring to the legal cutoff for abortions in the Sunshine State.
Catholics responded with backlash to Biden’s use of the sacramental. CatholicVote was the first to speak of it, writing on X, “This. Is. Vile. … You cannot be Catholic and support abortion! You cannot invoke GOD and promote Death!” Bishop Joseph Strickland and Deacon Keith Fournier had similar reactions: Strickland called for prayers for Biden and Fournier called for his excommunication for the sake of his salvation.
Fr. Murr, agreeing with Westen that what Biden did was “infuriating,” “gross,” and “blasphemous,” adds “pathetic,” on account of Biden being a politician. “He’s an actor, and he’s not a good one,” opines the priest. “So he does anything for dramatic effect.”
Looking to the “counter-sign” of the matter, Murr says “to show someone that you’re in disagreement with a stricter abortion law by making the sign of the cross, it makes no sense to anybody, except to the people who follow him, who are assured that he is a Catholic and that … somehow he’s representing American Catholicism, which is pathetic.”
Wright, meanwhile, says that a British Catholic noted on X that Biden appears to be making an “inverted sign of the cross,” something Wright calls either a “dreadful mistake or an intentional indication of the god that he actually worships.” The journalist analyzes the moment when Biden makes the sign and also how he makes it, pointing out that Biden makes the sign “very low” and “precisely” when he is “celebrating” a stronger pro-abortion stance.
Meanwhile, Jesuit priest Thomas Reese retweeted an ad that claimed Biden was God’s choice for president in order to save America. Reese attended a St. Patrick’s Day brunch with Biden at the White House last month. Also in attendance were dissident Jesuit priest James Martin, papal nuncio to the United States Cardinal Christophe Pierre, and homosexual former Prime Minister of Ireland Leo Varadkar.
While Murr says it reminds him of something Strickland recently said about “practical atheists” in the clergy, possibly a reference to Strickland’s recent letter on a lack of supernatural faith among clergy, Wright points to an observation Westen made that the crisis in the Church and the political crisis in the world are one and the same.
“What we have here is a kind of ritual behavior without substance,” says Wright.” It’s to maintain the trappings or the appearance of both the Church and liberal democracy, whilst doing everything that it forbade, everything that it is in fact the opposite of both of these doctrines.” Maintaining that Biden maintains freedom or heals division as much as Volodymyr Zelensky presides over a democracy, Wright concludes that what is presented to the public is a “sham” and an “insult to the American people to be compelled to take this kind of spectacle seriously.”
Meanwhile, the auxiliary bishop of the German Diocese of Essen, Ludger Schepers, commissioned 13 women as “deacons in the spirit” after they completed a three-and-a-half year training program with the heterodox “Women’s Diaconate Network.” The event took place at the Franciscan community of Waldbreitbach.
The women received congratulations for completing their training from Bishop Georg Bätzing, president of the German bishops’ conference. While Bätzing did not attend the ceremony, Schepers, along with Sister Edith-Maria Magar, superior of Waldbreitbach, called for a recognition of women deacons in a joint homily.
Murr, reacting to the event, returns to the point he made about Strickland and the clergy earlier in the show, saying of the Germans that one would have to ask himself if “these people believe in God.” If so, Murr confesses that it would not be the God he believes in, and says they act as though destroying everything they can. “This is not how the Church ever functioned, and how it’s not supposed to function at all,” the priest says.
Wright observes that a couple years ago, the German Synodal Way published a statement for women’s ordination and the liberalization of the treatment of homosexuals, noting that the event at Waldbreitbach is a “step along that way” to women’s ordination. He also notes that the years-old statement from the Synodal Way, which the German bishops have attempted to implement, is a “parallel religion” with little to do with Catholicism.
He also looks to the potential connection to the Kulturkampf waged by German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck in the days of the German Empire, noting that the state “took control of the Church” afterward, and that the state funds the Church in Germany. German politics, he further notes, has been dedicated to “national suicide for a very long time.”
“I think you’re seeing once again an accelerated manifestation of this interplay between a political and a religious crisis, that in the Church and the world around it, and Germany is just an exceptionally acute case,” he opines. “But at least they’re frank about it, and they have published their intentions several years ago.”
Reacting to an ecumenical LGBT prayer service at the Trier Cathedral hosted by Bishop Stephan Ackermann along with two Protestant ministers, Wright says that the “spectacles” we see are a “form of psychological warfare that involves humiliation.”
Calling the event a “deliberate attack” upon the center of Catholicism, Wright further notes that as the cathedral holds significant relics, including a nail from the True Cross and Christ’s seamless garment, the attack seems “intentional” and “calculated for maximum effect.”
“I think you’ll find that this is traditional in revolutionary movements, that it isn’t just about power, it’s not just about displays of power, it’s also about humiliation, and it’s also about degradation of who you determine is your enemy, and when we work out who the enemy is here, this appears to be diabolic,” he says.
Murr, following Wright, notes that a prostitute took the place of Our Lady during the French Revolution in Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. He also asks how far we have to go before we say “this is not the Catholic Church.”
“This is not the Catholic Church. It’s simply not,” the priest laments. “I don’t know what they’re doing. I doubt that they know exactly what they’re doing to the extent of it, but this is not Catholicism. I don’t know what it is, but it’s not Catholicism.”
He also notes in reaction to the German Parliament’s approval of a law allowing anyone, including minors, to change their gender once per year, that “when you give up living in reality, you can believe anything. … And this is where they are.”
For all this and more, tune in to this episode of Faith & Reason.
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