Will Joe Biden hurt God?

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Catholics can get denied communion for all sorts of reasons, formal cooperation with the intrinsic evil of abortion not least of all. It's reason #2 why I would never run for non-local office as a Democrat myself, reason #1 being my lack of patience with protocol. Joe Biden is probably just as sincere a Christian as most of us, which is to say not very; I suspect Fuzzy Bear in his more penitential moods would agree with that formulation.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

To expand on the remark I made last night, the issue with denying John Kerry or Joe Biden or whoever communion over abortion isn't with the concept, it's that, in the United States, it's almost always a decision undertaken by right-leaning priests or bishops in the context of Presidential election cycles; thus it's difficult to take seriously as a moral statement. In other countries it's probably different; Japan for example has a left-leaning bishops' conference and I could swear I once heard of some Catholic LDP lawmaker getting denied communion over something to do with Nippon Kaigi. But that's not how this works in America.

I mentioned in this post that other than a few fairly low-profile Republican "wets" there are practically no current American politicians or political commentators who provide a thoroughgoing orthodox Catholic perspective on public life. (And if you go looking for ones who do, you tend to find "integralists" who are wildly at variance with American society on foundational cultural issues like respect for individual rights and a roughly equal social role for women.) And I stand by that assessment.

So if we were going to systematically deny communion to any politician who broke from Catholic social teaching, we'd deny it not only to people like Biden but to Paul Ryan (who has said he thinks that trickle-down economics constitutes a preferential option for the poor), Bill Barr (who has an Immanuel Kant-like obsession with imposing the death penalty), Jeb Bush (who's explicitly denied the Pope's right to issue moral teachings on the economy), etc. etc. etc. To say nothing of all the pro-choice Catholic Democrats who don't become Presidential nominees! Even if we're only denying communion to politicians who formally cooperate with intrinsic evils we're still down John Kelly, Joe Biden again, the 2018 Trump-lite incarnation of Joe Donnelly, and Ken Cuccinelli, all over mass deportation--yes, Veritatis Splendor teaches that deportation is intrinsically evil.

I'm not saying that this shouldn't be done; if anything, I think most Catholics who hold political office should generally decline from presenting themselves for communion anyway. Some sort of betrayal of principle is almost inevitable for anybody wielding political power. Emperor Constantine was a massive HP, but he was very wise not to get baptized until he was on his deathbed.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

yes, Veritatis Splendor teaches that deportation is intrinsically evil[/b].

May you explain this in more detail to a non-Catholic?

Veritatis Splendor is a 1993 encyclical by John Paul II that was meant to repudiate various then-fashionable ideas in Catholic moral theology. These included (what JP2 saw as) moral relativism and in some cases also a form of virtue ethics that was overdeveloped to the point of discounting specific moral choices. Among other things, the encyclical strongly affirmed that there are "intrinsically evil" actions; lots of Catholics use this phrase to mean "super duper evil" but in fact what it means is an action that can't be undertaken even for the greater good. (That is to say, there are actions that are always wrong but whose wrongness is not particularly severe; for example, a white lie. Left-leaning theologians (such as yours truly!) will often argue that some of the classic Catholic sexual hobbyhorses, like masturbation, also fall into this category.) A passage in the encyclical takes a parade of horribles from the Vatican II document Gaudium et Spes and clarifies that they are to be understood as intrinsic evils:

The Second Vatican Council itself, in discussing the respect due to the human person, gives a number of examples of such acts: "Whatever is hostile to life itself, such as any kind of homicide, genocide, abortion, euthanasia and voluntary suicide; whatever violates the integrity of the human person, such as mutilation, physical and mental torture and attempts to coerce the spirit; whatever is offensive to human dignity, such as subhuman living conditions, arbitrary imprisonment, deportation, slavery, prostitution and trafficking in women and children; degrading conditions of work which treat labourers as mere instruments of profit, and not as free responsible persons: all these and the like are a disgrace, and so long as they infect human civilization they contaminate those who inflict them more than those who suffer injustice, and they are a negation of the honour due to the Creator".

(emphasis mine)

Of course, defining some of these words is a tricky thing, and "deportation" is one such word; some, such as the well-known apologist Jimmy Akin, argue that the intention of the Vatican II Council fathers couldn't possibly have been to establish that (for example) deporting a nonagenarian Nazi war criminal to stand trial in Germany is inherently morally wrong. But it's broadly accepted among moral theologians that the term does include any deportation of people who don't pose a danger to the host society, as well as any deportation motivated by ethnic animus.