Bless the bishops, Father, for they have sinned.
A substantial majority of U.S. Catholic bishops voted last week to initiate a process that could force President Biden to either alter his position on abortion, or never be allowed to take Communion again. It’s a new spin on the old stick-up trope of “Your money or your life.” The operative dichotomy here is: “Your politics or your faith.”
You’d think the hierarchy of American Catholicism would be enthralled with having the first Catholic president in 60 years – only the second in the country’s history. But come now the bishops with a theological ransom scheme designed to extort the White House.
As a recovering Methodist, I mean no sacrilege. Although I disagree with the Catholic position on abortion, I have always respected it as an understandable extension of the Church’s sanctity and dignity of life presumption, a principle it has applied to a panoply of social justice issues. (See capital punishment, gun control, medical care, racial justice, income inequality and the just war theory.)
But these bishops have taken their anti-abortion advocacy to an utterly cruel and immoral level. Catholics regard the Eucharist, or Holy Communion, as the Church’s most important sacrament. According to its teaching, the bread and wine taken during Mass literally transforms into the body and blood of Jesus Christ. To deny Communion to an observant Catholic is to deny the presence of Christ (here and here).
Although he has never worn his religion on his sleeve, Catholicism has long been an important part of Joe Biden’s life. According to the Washington Post, he was taught by nuns in Catholic schools, seriously contemplated entering the priesthood, rarely misses Mass and clutches rosary beads when making major decisions. The bishops’ threat is built upon the leverage of Biden’s deeply held faith. And that is why this extortion effort is so very wrong.
Without getting deeply into the weeds of Canon Law, the bishops going after Biden cite a provision that says Catholics cannot receive Communion if they are “conscious of grave sin.” That basically means knowingly and repeatedly engaging in a mortal sin without repentance. Since the Church views abortion as murder, the bishops argue that the president’s support for abortion rights is a disqualifying “grave sin.”
Over the centuries, Catholic theologians have drafted numerous lists of acts rising to the mortal sin level. Among the entries is extortion. Threatening someone with an adverse action in order to achieve something of value is seen as a “grave sin.” That’s why I wrote what I did in this piece’s first sentence. The bishops trying to extort the president of the United States are, themselves, committing a grave sin.
Of course, grave sins are nothing new to many of the Church’s priests and bishops. According to the Bishop Accountability Project, more than 7,000 American Catholic clerics have been credibly accused of sexually assaulting more than 20,000 victims, most of them children. For years, many bishops and other Church leaders were aware of the problem but covered it up, thereby allowing assaultive priests to continue offering Communion to their parishioners. Sins don’t get much graver than that.
Clearly, the bishops’ motive here has far less to do with the sanctity of the sacrament and far more to do with attempting to strongarm the president. In their rhetoric, the bishops would have us believe that they would deny Communion to any political figure who supported either abortion or capital punishment. Yet, none of them denied the Communion chalice to former Attorney General William Barr as he expanded the number of federal executions.
My immediate visceral reaction to the bishops’ vote last week was directed at the raw meanness of it all. Here’s Joe Biden, the person. At 78 he is actuarily in the twilight of his life, a life defined by his losses and his victories. He buried a wife and two children. His religion is deeply important to him. The hymns, the Bible verses, the prayers, the sacraments and all the other rituals come together as a tapestry that somehow sustains him, Joe the guy. How dare men of power in this Church even think of ripping out major threads of that tapestry by converting the Sacrament of Holy Communion into a political weapon.
This ugly predicament, however, offers up another consideration: What if the bishops’ extortion plan worked? What if the president, in order to be assured of access to Communion, pulled back all of his executive orders supporting a woman’s right to choose, and made it clear that, from this point forward, his administration would do everything possible to make abortion illegal? Never mind the fact that 60 percent of the country – and 57 percent of Catholics – support abortion rights. The result of such a power play is almost unthinkable: a bunch of men with “bishop” in their title would have commandeered the presidency of the United States.
Fortunately, that’s only a hypothetical, and one very unlikely to ever surface. Biden would never cave to this extortion attempt. Asked about the threat last week, he told a reporter, “It’s a private matter, and I don’t think that’s going to happen.” The leaders of the two dioceses where he worships most frequently, Washington, D.C. and Wilmington, Delaware, have made it clear they have no intention of keeping Biden away from Communion in their jurisdictions. Yet, the mere fact that a sizeable group of Catholic leaders in this country have come this far in their threat to force the president’s hand on one of the most volatile issues of the day is, to say the least, cause for great alarm.
It is very possible – even likely – that the U.S. Supreme Court will one day drive the final nail into the coffin of Roe v. Wade. As sad as that would be for a majority of Americans, it would nevertheless be in accordance with our democratic, three-branch system of government. A similar result coming from a takeover of the Executive Branch by the National Conference of Catholic Bishops would be more than catastrophic.
It would be a grave sin.