ROME — Catholic League President Bill Donohue said Friday he maintains a “healthy skepticism” about President Joe Biden’s unconfirmed claim that Pope Francis called him a “good Catholic” and encouraged him to “keep receiving Communion.”
Biden met with Pope Francis in the Vatican for approximately 75 minutes Friday morning, after which he was asked by reporters if the issue of abortion had arisen during their meeting.
“No, it didn’t,” Biden said. “It came up — we just talked about the fact that he was happy I was a good Catholic and I should keep receiving Communion.”
From what we “know about the Vatican’s handling of the meeting and Biden’s long record of lying about many important matters, we are maintaining a healthy skepticism about the president’s rendition,” Dr. Donohue states.
Pulling no punches, Donohue writes that “Biden is a pathological liar,” which makes his account of the meeting dubious at best.
The president’s promiscuous relationship with the truth goes back over 50 years, Donohue observes, and involves repeated episodes of plagiarism, reversal of facts, misremembering, and arrant tale-telling, all of which have been confirmed by left-wing outlets like Slate and the Washington Post, which are firmly in Biden’s corner.
In 1987, for instance, Slate recounted that Biden had not only plagiarized a speech by British Labor Party leader Neil Kinnock, but had appropriated personal biographical facts from Kinnock’s life as if they were his own.
Biden “plagiarized from speeches given by Robert Kennedy, John F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey,” Donohue notes, and “confessed to receiving an ‘F’ in a law school course because he plagiarized five pages from a published article.”
The Washington Post documented a series of lies Biden told about his academic credentials, including claims he had graduated with “three degrees” from the University of Delaware. (He received one.) He also stated that he graduated at the top of his class at Syracuse Law School. (He was 76th in a class of 85.)
More recently, the Post also published a list of 78 false or misleading statements Biden had made in his first 100 days in office.
It is for these reasons, Donohue said, “that we are skeptical of Biden’s account of what the pope said to him at their meeting.”
ALBERTO PIZZOLI/AFP via Getty Images
For its part, the Vatican has declined to comment on Biden’s rendition of what transpired between him and the pope. Asked if the pope had said Biden should keep receiving Holy Communion, Matteo Bruni, the director of the Holy See press office, said, “I would consider it a private conversation, and it is limited to what was said in the public statement,” which made no mention of such a comment.
US President Joe Biden, left, talks with Pope Francis as they meet at the Vatican, Friday, Oct. 29, 2021 (Vatican Media via AP).
