In Facebook post, JPII Institute defends Biden’s abortion record

Rome, Italy, Jan 28, 2021 / 04:41 pm (CNA).- The John Paul II Pontifical Theological Institute for Marriage and Family Sciences generated a flurry of controversy in the Italian Catholic blogosphere this week, after its Facebook page defended Joe Biden’s support of legal abortion.
The Pontifical Theological Institute’s Facebook page reposted an article published on Jan. 20 in the Italian edition of the Huffington Post, titled “Joe Biden, a Catholic at the White House among the poisons of the American Church.”
The article emphasized what it calls Joe Biden's “Social Gospel” and presented a series of declarations by political scientists and theologians to support the theory that Biden's election is complementary to Pope Francis' election because both of them give a sort of new breath to Catholic social teaching.
The Facebook post drew significant criticism, which is not uncommon.
Unusual, however, was the response of the Pontifical Theological Institute's account to some of these critical comments.
Some readers questioned why the Institute was praising Biden, who is a strong supporter of legal abortion, in sharp contrast with Catholic teaching.
In response, the Pontifical Theological Institute profile said that “defending the right to abortion does not mean defending abortion.”
The Institute's profile added that “above all, if we have to assign Catholicity licenses based on the political positions, very few politicians could describe themselves as Catholic.”
The statement is openly in contrast with the social teaching of the Church, and in particular with John Paul II's encyclical Evangelium Vitae.
John Paul II stressed that “to claim the right to abortion, infanticide and euthanasia, and to recognize that right in law, means to attribute to human freedom a perverse and evil significance: that of an absolute power over others and against others.”