Catholics for Biden held its national kickoff call on the evening of Thursday, September 3. It was, predictably, an hour-long attempt to make us all forget that the candidate is implicit in—and his party is devoted to—the vilest crime ever perpetrated against humanity. It was a less than brilliant exercise in misdirection….

Sister Simone Campbell, SSS… was the big-ticket speaker of the night, given the non-appearance of Mr. Biden himself. (Make what you will of the fact that Catholics for Joe Biden cannot seem to count among its ranks Joe Biden.) Sister Simone is a longtime professional activist with a remarkable skill for locating progressive dogma writ in minute script between the lines of magisterial teaching.

Early in her remarks, Sister Simone admonished a large chunk of her audience. “White Catholics have gotten it wrong in the past,” apparently referring to their failure to vote for her preferred, left-wing candidates—and implicitly recalling the understudied doctrine of ethnic infallibility.

As she went on, the would-be nun repeated again and again that Catholics are “multi-issue voters,” a carefully crafted euphemism for “keep killing babies, as long as the government pays for it, and for everything else.” It wasn’t long before the mask came off: “In fact, the reversal of Roe v. Wade, the outlawing of abortion, has never been our faith.” Well, that’s just untrue. There’s no gray area here, and no line-blurring or strategic vagueness. It’s a lie and a scandal, plain and simple. The moral seriousness of the mere possibility that listeners might believe her outrageous claim cannot be overstated.

Throughout, Sister Simone peddled liberally in the left-wing Catholic’s favorite tool—a cartoon depiction of Pope Francis as some hippie warrior for the pet causes of American progressives. She pointed listeners to a website her lobbying group has created, called popefrancisvoter.org. It provides a quiz that purports to compare the respondent’s values with Pope Francis’s, and then to compare both with the respective candidates’ values. Absent, of course, is any reference to the Holy Father’s belief that fighting abortion is the “preeminent issue” in modern politics, or that abortionists are Nazis “with white gloves.” Rather, the nine questions essentially amount to nine variations on “Do you have basic human decency?” with about as much nuance as was on display in Thursday’s call. My result was:

You agree with Biden. Your Catholic Voter Score is 100 percent.

Joe Biden shares your Catholic priorities. His policies will protect people in poverty, the elderly, and migrants and reject racism. You are a Pope Francis Voter, and you must prioritize these sacred issues in the voting booth this November….

The above comes from a Sept. 9 story by Declan Leary in Crisis Magazine.