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Welcome to Holy Smoke, the Spectator's Religion podcast. I'm Damien Thompson.

The election of the first radically pro-choice president of the United States is wreaking havoc in the American Catholic Church, destroying its fragile internal cohesion.

President Joe Biden, whose own internal cohesion is discreetly acknowledged to be in a fragile state,

has made it clear that he really does

intend to encourage women to have late-term abortions, to open up women's bathrooms to trans women,

and to force nuns to pay for their employees' contraceptive and abortion pills.

It seems like he's planning to feed into the shredder any bits of the Catholic

Magisterium that might offend his vice-president, Kamala Harris, an Olympic class offence-taker,

whose views on Orthodox Catholicism read to me like extracts from the awful disclosures of

Maria Monk, rewritten by Black Lives Matter.

Now, there was a time not so long ago when a devout Catholic president with this sort of

policy agenda would have been shunned by socially conservative Catholic Democrats.

But that particular tribe has been wiped out.

Today's Catholic Democrats are intensely relaxed about gay marriage, remarriage after divorce,

and it goes without saying, artificial birth control.

They don't necessarily share President Biden's tolerance of very late-term abortions,

but they're moving in that direction.

Their bishops are more conservative on these matters, but, as we discussed on Holy Smoke a couple

of weeks ago, when they tried to point out on inauguration day that the Biden administration was

planning to trash Catholic teaching and remove legal protection from social conservatives who insisted on adhering to it,

they got slapped down by the Pro-Viden Vatican and its self-appointed representative on the Conference of Bishops,

...