VATICAN CITY (LifeSiteNews) — The deputy director of the Holy See’s in-house news organization has praised U.S. President Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the 2024 election race as a “noble choice,” comparing it to the 2013 resignation of Pope Benedict XVI.
As the international media continues to come to terms with the implications of Joe Biden’s July 21 withdrawal from the presidential election, Vatican News published an opinion piece in the Vatican’s daily paper, praising the notoriously pro-abortion, pro-LGBT president for the move.
Entitled “Knowing when to step down,” the commentary was penned by Alessandro Gisotti, the deputy editorial director of Vatican Media. Commenting that “stepping back has a cost,” Gisotti compared Biden’s withdrawal from the 2024 U.S. election to South African President Nelson Mandela’s 1999 decision not to seek re-election and also to the sudden resignation of Pope Benedict XVI.
“Whenever a prominent public figure chooses to step back, to take a leave of absence, he or she immediately captures public sympathy and esteem,” wrote Gisotti, continuing:
We experienced this in a striking way on February 11, 2013, with Benedict XVI’s historic renunciation of the Petrine ministry. We grasp it – albeit in a different sphere – just as evidently in these last 24 hours after U.S. President Joe Biden announced that he will give up his run for a second term in the White House, leaving it to his party to choose a new candidate to challenge Donald Trump (Biden has, however, already indicated Vice President Kamala Harris as his preference to succeed him in the Oval Office).
As noted by LifeSite’s Calvin Freiburger, Biden is the oldest president in U.S. history, and throughout his tenure he has been hounded by concerns that he has been suffering cognitive decline, based on increasingly frequent public instances of odd statements, incoherence, tripping, and apparent fatigue and confusion, with polls finding majorities considered him too old to effectively serve a second term.
READ: Biden withdraws from presidential race, endorses VP Kamala Harris
Numerous conservative commentators and analysts have for some time – but especially in recent months – been highlighting what appeared as obvious signs of Biden’s cognitive decline. Such decline, however, had been largely ignored and whitewashed by the mainstream media and the political establishment: until Biden’s disastrous late June TV debate with former President Donald Trump. From that moment on, the full force of the combined media and political body appears to have been set in motion against Biden, with some vigor.
Gisotti made no direct reference to this apparent cover-up and about-turn regarding Biden.
Instead, he commented that “as is well known, the decision had been in the air for some time, and many prominent members of the Democratic Party had urged Biden to drop his re-election bid.”
He defended Biden’s continued 2024 election campaigning, saying how “the very personal and certainly not easy decision not to run for another four-year term as president has to be ascribed to him.”
READ: ‘Bloodless coup’: GOP lawmakers demand answers after Biden drops out of 2024 race
This choice, argued Gisotti, was “a noble choice, which several observers have noted, puts the good of the country above his personal interests. And this is beyond political assessments of his presidency, which is thus drawing to a close.”
The Italian journalist and former director of the Holy See Press Office compared Biden to Nelson Mandela – the South African president who introduced abortion on demand into the country in 1996 by overturning then-current laws restricting abortion.
“In 1999, Nelson Mandela made a similar – and in some respects even stronger and more compelling – decision, when he chose not to run for a second presidential term and retired from public life,” wrote Gisotti. “He had defeated apartheid and initiated the reconciliation of his beloved South Africa. Now it was time to leave to others to reap the sowing that had cost him 27 years in prison.”
Abortion activists have praised Mandela’s pro-abortion legislation, calling him a “a global leader” on so-called “reproductive freedom,” who “transformed the lives of millions of South African women.”
For his part, Biden will also be remembered for his persistent and determined promotion of abortion, despite the fact that such promotion contradicts the tenets of the Catholic Faith that he claims he adheres to.
The Catholic Church teaches that abortion is always wrong because it kills an innocent human being, thus violating the Church’s prohibition on murder. (CCC 2270-2272) The Vatican’s 2004 memo states that a politician “consistently campaigning and voting for permissive abortion and euthanasia laws” manifests “formal cooperation” with grave sin and must be “denied” the Eucharist.
READ: EXCLUSIVE: Cardinal Müller joins calls for US bishops to excommunicate Biden
Indeed, after Biden used his 2024 State of the Union Address to promise to “restore Roe v. Wade as the law of the land again,” the former head of the Vatican’s doctrine office, Gerhard Cardinal Müller, joined his voice to that of outraged American Catholics in calling for Biden’s excommunication.
“In other times, people like this would be excommunicated,” Cardinal Müller told this correspondent during an interview in Rome. “In former times, the Popes and the bishops had no fear to excommunicate, like St. Ambrose of Milan.”
Biden also signed legislation codifying homosexual “marriage” in U.S. federal law and executive orders promoting contraception and LGBT ideology.
Gisotti closed by opining how Biden might – now he is unfettered by campaigning – “unleash bold and creative new initiatives to achieve those goals that will define his legacy in history, particularly in foreign policy, starting with ending the conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East.”
It is to be hoped, for the sake of Biden’s soul and the lives of millions of unborn children, that Biden does not use his remaining six months to continue his already rampant push to extend abortion.