Biden, the church and communion

In My Humble Opinion
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There’s a bit more to it than that. The Church considers what it calls “scandal,” the leading of others into sin, to be a very big deal indeed. And Archbishop Cordileone points out that Biden’s identification of himself as a believing, observant Catholic, combined with his advocacy of abortion rights, could lead Catholics to think the Church has relaxed its position on abortion.

Here’s a better explanation than I could possibly give:

And that’s from America, the publication of the Society of Jesus in the United States, so not exactly a right-wing propaganda organ.

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A propaganda organ, to be sure, just not a right wing one.

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But my point is that they are trying to use their position to influence public policy.

They may have their justifications, but in doing so, they remove any semblance of not being a political lobbying group.

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If your characterization of America as a “propaganda organ” is intended to denigrate that publication (I take it you’re a subscriber – you seem to have formed an opinion, and it must be based on familiarity), or the Society of Jesus, I disagree, strongly. If you’re not familiar with the Jesuits (the order of which Pope Francis was a member), it’s worth a bit of exploration.

I suspect that, with the exception of issues around abortion, you’d find the Jesuits to be about as far to the left as it’s possible to get in American politics.

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And, within certain limits, they have every right to do so. And this policy, when applied to the President of the United States,* is obviously very public, but denial of Communion happens just about every day in every parish in the country, just less publicly.

It’s something the Church has every right to do.

  • If it’s applied to the President. We’re all talking as if the USCCB has already done this. It hasn’t. The vote doesn’t happen for months, and the bishop who would have to implement the policy is on record as being opposed. As is the Pope himself, which actually does matter.
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What public statement do you think the Catholic Church has made here?

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You’re sort of right. But also kind of missing the point that abortion is, as far as the Church is concerned, a much graver sin than fornication. Fornication is, after all, merely a sin of the flesh.

Here’s the great Christian apologist C.S. Lewis on sins of the flesh:

The sins of the flesh are bad, but they are the least bad of all sins. All the worst pleasures are purely spiritual: the pleasure of putting other people in the wrong, of bossing and patronising and spoiling sport, and back-biting, the pleasures of power, of hatred.

From Mere Christianity. No, Lewis wasn’t a Catholic, but he was high-church C of E, and basically an Anglo-Catholic, or even a crypto-Catholic.

68

Back when Kennedy was running for president, there was fear that the Catholic church would exert undue pressure on him, effectively putting the church in charge of the presidency.

This was dismissed as nonsense, the church wouldn’t use its influence to manipulate public figures like that.

Now it seems as though they have no reservations about it. What limits would you place on their control over the commander in chief of our country?

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I would not want the Catholic Church to have one tiny iota of control over our president.

And they don’t. President Biden is free to reject the Church’s teaching on the duty of public officials to follow Catholic teaching. As he seems to have done for most of his career. And he is free to practice his faith as he sees fit, even if it at times puts him in opposition to the Church hierarchy (and some, at least, of the laity). As he also seems to have done.

Seriously. Joe Biden is the President of the United States, arguably the most powerful man on the planet. He can tell the Church to go fuck itself if he feels like it, and there’s nothing the Church can do about it. Except maybe deny him Communion. If they even decide to do that. Which, I point out again, they haven’t.

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Mind that the Bishops have just voted in the affirmative on a decision to issue guidance on the topic. It isn’t certain what that guidance will be.

The USCCB also has no actual power in the Church in ordinary circumstances. They will only issue guidance, which all American bishops will be free to take or leave. To create something akin to a binding ordinance, requires a supermajority vote of the bishops AND sign off by the Pope. Neither of which will happen.

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Thank you. I’ve been trying to explain this. I don’t seem to be succeeding.

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But abortion is not a graver sin than the death penalty, unless I’ve been misinformed. And these bishops totally ignore, relatively speaking, the many Republicans in office who are Catholic and advocate for the death penalty.

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I wish I was better at explaining this stuff, but I’ll give it a shot. But I’m not a theologian, not an apologist, not any kind of expert.

The death penalty has, until quite recently, been more or less in the same category as war. That is, something that is not inherently sinful, but that can be justified only as a last resort. It may be necessary for a nation to go to war to defend itself against an aggressor. And it may (but keep reading…) be necessary for a society to take the life of a violent aggressor to protect itself. While acknowledging this, popes since John Paul II have urged all nations to abolish the death penalty.

At that time, the Catechism said -

The traditional teaching of the Church does not exclude, presupposing full ascertainment of the identity and responsibility of the offender, recourse to the death penalty, when this is the only practicable way to defend the lives of human beings effectively against the aggressor.

If, instead, bloodless means are sufficient to defend against the aggressor and to protect the safety of persons, public authority should limit itself to such means, because they better correspond to the concrete conditions of the common good and are more in conformity to the dignity of the human person.

Today, in fact, given the means at the State’s disposal to effectively repress crime by rendering inoffensive the one who has committed it, without depriving him definitively of the possibility of redeeming himself, cases of absolute necessity for suppression of the offender ‘today … are very rare, if not practically non-existent’.

So the wrongness of the death penalty is conditional, not absolute.

Under Francis, the Church went a step further. The Catechism now says:

Recourse to the death penalty on the part of legitimate authority, following a fair trial, was long considered an appropriate response to the gravity of certain crimes and an acceptable, albeit extreme, means of safeguarding the common good.

Today, however, there is an increasing awareness that the dignity of the person is not lost even after the commission of very serious crimes. In addition, a new understanding has emerged of the significance of penal sanctions imposed by the state. Lastly, more effective systems of detention have been developed, which ensure the due protection of citizens but, at the same time, do not definitively deprive the guilty of the possibility of redemption.

Consequently, the Church teaches, in the light of the Gospel, that “the death penalty is inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person”, and she works with determination for its abolition worldwide.

Pope Francis has also proposed the abolition of life sentences. I can’t remember the exact words, and Google isn’t helping right now, but he called it something like a back-door death penalty.

Abortion, on the other hand, is considered to be intrinsically evil by the Church. You (and I) may disagree with the Church, but it has consistently taught that abortion is intrinsically evil.

So, yes, abortion is different from the death penalty. One is intrinsically evil, the other is not.

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If someone takes their religion seriously, and believes that not taking communion endangers their immortal soul, then it really is a fairly strong influence they are trying to have over him.

As an analogy, let’s say that he has a heart condition, and the American Heart Association disagrees with some of his positions as president, so they start a discussion on whether they should ban doctors from treating his heart condition if he doesn’t come over to their way of thinking about them.

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Of course. And the Church should try to exert moral influence over all Catholics. I mean, that’s what churches do, right? I’m sure the imam of whatever the main mosque in D.C. would try to exert moral influence over some future hypothetical Muslim president.

It’s not a reasonable expectation that the Catholic Church (or any church) should just decide that once someone is elected to high office, the Church is suspending judgment and suspending the rules that have been in effect for just about forever.

But Joe Biden, like any adult Catholic, is entirely free to walk away from the Church. If he doesn’t, if he has faith (and I don’t doubt Biden’s claim that he does have faith) he will (like me) take its teachings seriously. But nobody is holding a gun to his head.

President Biden has come to a different position on his responsibility as a public servant than some Catholic bishops (and laity) would like. He’s handling this, as far as I can tell, quite well. I hope the USCCB doesn’t try to make a stand on this. It’s just stupid.

As Pope Francis said,

The Eucharist, although it is the fullness of sacramental life, is not a prize for the perfect but a powerful medicine and nourishment for the weak.

Evangelii Gaudium.

ETA: So maybe Francis would agree with your American Heart Association analogy.

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Over their actions in their personal lives. Not how they execute a secular office.

I would take the same exception to that sort of extortion as well.

If they said that the dinners offered in the White House had to follow Muslim Dietary laws, I’d be fine with that. If they demanded that he veto agricultural bills that involved pork products, I wouldn’t be.

And if the sanction was over him having an abortion, (or his wife having one with his knowledge and support), or him personally advocating for someone to get an abortion, then that would be him personally breaking with the church’s teachings. But to hold him accountable for upholding the laws of the country is not.

To a devout Catholic, being excommunicated is worse than death. It is worse than holding a gun to his head, it is threatening his soul with damnation.

I suppose the solution is to only elect atheists to office, and disallow anyone who can be governed by the church.

I guess it’s not bad that I’m on the same side as the Pope here. It’s just the American Catholics that I am at odds with. (And not even all of them, only the ones that are condoning this action)

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I think that’s an artificial and false distinction. I would hope that any president (senator, city councilman, borough president, whatever) would not wall off their moral beliefs from their conduct as an officeholder. I’m not sure that’s even possible. And I mean that whether the person in question is a Catholic, a Protestant, a Jew, an atheist, a Zoroastrian, a whatever.

Absent that kind of moral consistency, we’re looking at people who say “hey, it’s just business” as they loot your retirement account. I’m not a huge fan of compartmentalization.

Also, President Biden isn’t just executing a secular office, he’s a policymaker.

I’m sorry. This has been a fairly interesting conversation so far, but to say that a church (any church) expecting its adherents to follow its moral teaching is “extortion” seems to be pretty off-base.

Again, he’s a policy-maker, and made promises that he’d ensure that, even if Roe v. Wade were to be overturned, he’d propose legislation to ensure that legal abortion on demand (within limits) remained a right. And also that federal funds could be used to pay for the procedure.

Perhaps. But the USCCB is not threatening Biden with damnation (and they don’t have the authority to do so). I’m not even sure they’re threatening him with excommunication. Some of them are proposing that he should be denied Communion as long as he publicly advocates for, and acts to safeguard and extent the right to, legal abortion.

I suspect that you’d find that a majority of American Catholics don’t think this would be a good idea (assuming they pay any attention at all to the USCCB).

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Just dropping this here for reference. It’s not the first time the USCCB has pulled this (in my opinion purely political) crap:

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They aren’t just expecting something. They are attempting to force the issue by taking away something they know that any Catholic would want. They are using Holy Communion as a tool to try and enforce compliance.

This is not something every church does. Most churches I know of will tell you what they think God says, but they themselves will not do anything to try and bar you from anything. The only means of enforcement is your own conviction by God, and possibly some social pressure to conform. Not direct punishment.

This is Holy Communion, something all Catholics must partake in. The whole reason why excommunication is bad is that it denies the person from participating in the Eucharist, risking the damnation of their soul.

This very much is “Do what we say, or we’ll punish you”—which is a form of extortion. It’s ignoring the Church’s position on the separation of Church and State and support of a secular government.

Someone is perfectly allowed to say “I don’t personally support abortion, but it’s not up to me to interfere in the health decisions of someone else. We are not a government ruled by religion, and thus I cannot force my religious view on someone else.” That’s how secular governments are supposed to work. Freedom of religion means that no one in the government has the right to try and force their personal religious beliefs on others.

There are some Christian churches who fight against that idea—we usually call them Dominionists—but the Catholic church is not one of them.

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Right. That whole kerfuffle was then-Archbishop Raymond Burke (of St. Louis) making some noise.

Burke was ultimately stripped (“not reappointed”) of his important Congregation assignments and “promoted” to a position where’s he out of the way (Patron of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, a position in which he mainly gets to shake hands with rich donors).

He is currently really pushing the limits of dissent within the church and is, in my opinion, borderline schismatic and in sympathy with such actual schismatics (again, in my opinion) as the Society of St. Pius X.

Basically, I’m glad you posted this. It just goes to show that the position under discussion is an extreme position, taken, for the most part, by extremists.

It is not the position of the Vatican, or the Catholic Church as a whole.