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Will the conservatives militarize the Eucharist?
Photo: Win McNamee / Getty Images
It seems that a significant number of Catholic bishops want to fight with the second Catholic president of the United States, reports The Associated Press:
When the American Catholic Bishops hold their next national meeting in June, they will decide whether to send a harsher message than ever to President Joe Biden and other Catholic politicians: do not receive Communion if you persist in publicly defending the right to abortion. .
A document is being drafted by a committee of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops “clarifying” the Church’s position on what some conservatives have called “Eucharistic consistency,” referring to a uniform rule denying the fellowship to those who are publicly associated with promoting the “grave moral evil” of legalized abortion. If the policy statement is indeed approved, it could have the effect of nationalizing a decision that was previously left to individual bishops and even individual pastors, who for the most part refused to deploy the extreme sanction of de facto excommunication. , whatever their conviction. on abortion.
The possibility of such a move by UCCB conservatives became apparent on the day of Biden’s inauguration, when UCCB President Jose Gomez, Archbishop of Los Angeles, warned that “our new president is committed to pursuing certain policies that would advance moral evils and threaten human life and dignity, most seriously in the areas of abortion, contraception, marriage and gender”. Chicago Cardinal Blaise Cupich, considered a close ally of Pope Francis, himself friendly to Biden, suddenly critical Gomez’s statement, making it clear that the bishops were taken aback by the shooting at the first Catholic president to be inaugurated in 60 years. But conservative sentiment for a reprimand from Biden persisted.
Liberal Catholic writer Michael Sean Winters Recount Washington To post that “there will not be a two-thirds vote for anything that suggests Biden is not receiving Communion.” And, he noted, the Vatican would also have to approve it. In a broader context, Pope Francis has opposite using access to fellowship as a means of forcing conformity to Church doctrine, and Biden’s own bishops in Delaware and Washington DC, also refused to arm the Eucharist.
Even if the Tory bet leads nowhere, the debate is likely to shed more light on members of the clergy who choose to defend themselves by publicly denying communion to pro-choice politicians. This arrived at Biden in a church in South Carolina in 2019. And when John Kerry was running for president in 2004, his staff had to make sure he didn’t land on a given Sunday in one of the scattered dioceses whose bishops had publicly defended denying him access to the sacrament. Like Biden, Kerry faithfully attended Mass. (Non-ecclesiastical albeit overtly religious presidents like Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush did not have to worry about the embarrassment of being excluded from the altar or the pews.). You have to wonder if the Biden controversy will encourage conservative clerics in and beyond the Catholic faith to more actively control the political views of their herds, especially those who are public figures. This is all part of a trend in which the religious right constantly warns of the threat of secularism while making the causes of secular cultural warfare sacred.
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