Calling President Biden

Regis Martin, professor of theology at the Franciscan University of Steubenville, writes of the meeting between Catholic Bishop Fulton Sheen and Haywood Broun, in which the newspaper columnist decided “I do not want to die in my sins.” Broun was received into the Catholic Church shortly thereafter. 

“In thinking about Broun’s conversion, it is important that we not lose sight of the fact that Sheen himself felt a great urgency to reach out—to try and win this man’s soul for God,” Martin writes in When Salvation is a Phone Call Away.

It is the duty of priests and bishops to save souls, Martin says.

“Is it too much to ask, therefore, that maybe one or two of them might begin with Joe Biden? Besides being their president, he happens also to be their brother in Christ, who stands in peril of losing his soul for his refusal—both obdurate and longstanding—to protect innocent, unborn human life. Does Joe Biden not have a phone number that they might use to call him up? Who knows, perhaps catch him on the fly next time he shows up for Mass?

“What would it cost for, say, the Cardinal-Archbishop of Washington, D.C. to make that call? To schedule a meeting in which he, the chief Shepherd—they live in the same neighborhood after all—were to sit down with a member of his flock who has gone astray and try and bring him back to a right relationship with Almighty God? An hour of his day maybe, in order to (as they like to say in social justice circles) speak truth to power? And not just to save his soul, which is irreducibly precious, but to put an end to a scandal that grows graver by the day.”

https://www.crisismagazine.com/2021/when-salvation-is-a-phone-call-away