From the article:
In recent years, an increasingly focused group of conservative Catholics has been pressing the prioritizing of opposing abortion above all else,and is seeking to keep Catholic politicians who in any way support abortion access from the sacrament, considered the core rite of Catholic worship.
For Bidenâs team, that sometimes has meant dedicating staffers during busy travel weeks to make sure Biden, who supports abortion rights, avoids priests and bishops who would deny him the sacrament over his stance on the issue. The president was denied Communion in 2019 by a South Carolina priest who said any leader âwho advocates for abortion places himself or herself outside of Church teaching.â
John Kelly, who did Catholic outreach for the Democratic National Committee, was part of a team in 2008, during the Obama-McCain race, that would find welcoming parishes for Biden. He remembers the angry backlash from Bidenâs staff when he suggested one of Bidenâs priest friends simply travel with the campaign to avoid complications.
âThey felt, and they were right, that he wants to go to church and should have the right to. He wants to worship with his community. His understanding of the Eucharist was it shouldnât be done hidden in private. I very much felt the Eucharist was being weaponized,â Kelly said.
This week at their annual spring meeting, the bishops of the U.S. Catholic Church â the largest faith group in the country â will debate the meaning of Communion and whether Catholic politicians who support abortion rights should be barred from receiving it. The conversation and a vote among the churchâs top clerics could have significant ramifications because it centers on one of the most intimate moments of Catholic worship and binds it uniquely to a specific political and policy position.
The vote comes after two decades of deliberate, passionate focus by Catholic political and theological conservatives to make abortion a litmus test for the sacrament, while church teachings on poverty, climate, racism and authoritarianism, among other things, become more subjective to follow. It also comes after years of hardening toward abortion opponents within the Democratic Party.
But Bidenâs candidacy, for the most conservative, created a new kind of urgency.
At a USCCB meeting in the fall of 2019, they discussed whether to make abortion officially their No. 1 concern. âWe are at a unique moment with the upcoming election cycle to make a real challenge to Roe v. Wade , given the possible changes to the Supreme Court. We should not dilute our efforts to protect the unborn,â Archbishop Alexander Sample of Portland, Ore., told his fellow bishops, according to the National Catholic Reporter.
The group then overwhelmingly voted for the first time to call abortion the âpreeminent priorityâ in a letter attached to its voting guide. The term had been used in some diocesan voting guides before.
When Biden was elected the following fall, the USCCB at itsNovember meeting called a working group of bishops to deal with the âdifficultâ situation of the second-ever Catholic president being a strong advocate for policies the church opposes on abortion and LGBT legal rights. The working group recommended creating a document on âeucharistic coherence.â
Then in May, a letter to the bishops arrived from the Vatican. Leaked to the Catholic news site the Pillar, the head of the Vaticanâs doctrine-making arm warned the USCCB president that the process of creating a policy on Catholic politicians could be divisive and to move forward only if it created more unity. He pointed the bishops to a 2002 document signed by Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI, who was then head of the doctrine-making body, a complex and subtle paper that warns about moral relativism as well as violating peopleâs individual conscience.
Recently, almost 70 bishops wrote to Archbishop JosĂ© Gomez, the USCCB president, to urge a delay in any discussion on Communion until they could meet in person and work toward more unity. But Gomez said this weekâs meeting would include a discussion about âthe meaning of the Eucharistâ and would be followed by a vote on whether to have the USCCBâs doctrine committee draft a document on the topic.
There is simply no doubt that a large group of conservative American bishops have been engaged in a long term effort to make abortion opposition a litmus test for politicians to qualify for receiving communion; or that this latest story represents the next step in that effort using the existence of a pro-abortion rights Catholic President as the impetus; or that the Vatican is sufficiently alarmed by it as to attempt to head it off with Ladariaâs letter. I canât really understand why you keep apparently denying that thereâs anything going on at all here.
