Rep Ro Khanna, Bishop Barron clash on abortion, find common ground on religious liberty and immigration

FIRST ON FOX — Bishop Robert Barron — one of the most popular Catholic clergymen in the United States — held his first interview with a Democratic lawmaker on social issues important to the Catholic faith.

California Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna spoke with the bishop in the latest episode of "Bishop Barron Presents" to be released this week.

Khanna and Barron discussed hard topics including religious liberty, Big Tech and abortion in a gesture of bridging ideological gaps.

Khanna — a Hindu whose father was arrested for support of Mahatma Gandhi in India — expressed intense support for faith's role in the public square and the necessity of religious belief in shaping good policy.

In the interview, he praised the shared value of hesitation to respond to violence with violence found in both Hinduism and Christianity.

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"We need faith informing politics because otherwise, someone hits you, someone strikes you, and the human response is you want to strike them back," Khanna said. "What faith at its best does is make us pause and ask ‘What is the ideal way to live?’"

"That doesn't mean we can always live in an ideal way in a fallen world […] but certainly it should help shape the action and give us pause," he added.

Barron, who serves as the bishop of the Diocese of Winona–Rochester and previously served as an auxiliary bishop of Los Angeles, asked Khanna about perceived hostility toward religion coming from the Democratic Party.

"What I've noticed in the last, say, 30 years, is the Left becoming increasingly hostile to religion," Barron told Khanna. "Not even indifferent to it, I mean actively hostile to it. And that worries a lot of us."

Khanna recounted an incident in his youth when his family moved to a town that worried the new Hindu family would not be willing to put out the traditional Christmas candles that all other houses used to illuminate the neighborhood — a tradition the Khannas were more than willing to join.

"In my view, having a robust engagement with people's faith is a better way than telling people ‘Don’t have faith in the public square,'" Khanna told the bishop.

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Barron also pressed Khanna on key social issues, including immigration and abortion.

Regarding immigration, Khanna said that while there needs to be recognition that immigration can be valuable to the United States, some in the Democratic Party may have lost touch with basic border policies.

"There's a sense — I think from some, and I don't want to be unfair about it — but there is a sense from some maybe on our side that we are not doing enough to protect the border," Khanna told Barron. "We, in my view, should be funding border agents, we should be funding immigration judges, we should be funding technology. We should be saying clearly that a nation needs safe and secure borders and not be demonizing the border patrol or not funding it."

Abortion proved the most contentious issue during the interview, with a calm but increasingly tense back-and-forth on the humanity of unborn babies.

"The framework in my standing, California, is that you can have an abortion up until viability. And then after that, it's an exception for the health of the mother in that circumstance, which is very, very rare," Khanna told Barron in response to the bishop's assertion that abortion is the single biggest issue responsible for Catholics disaffiliating from the Democratic Party. 

The representative continued, "Now, my view is that that decision should be for the woman and her doctor in getting that healthcare. But I think the challenge is that we also start to talk about these exceedingly rare cases that then become the conversation — where that's not the majority of the abortions by any stretch, probably less than one or two percent." 

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"Even if that were the case, that is still a lot of babies being murdered from our perspective. And how is that ever acceptable in a decent society?" Barron asked.

The bishop continued, "Now that the thing has moved to the state level — well good, I'll take any restriction I can get. So if Democrats are willing to say 'We'll restrict [abortion] here or there,' great — and I think the Church would embrace that and say, 'At least we're moving in the right direction.' But I think we need to have a conversation about life and the human being."

The "Bishop Barron Presents" interview will premiere on Feb. 22.