Communion & Communio

Forty-four years is a long time and a lot has changed since the last Catholic ran for president. Early in his campaign, John Kerry opined that the question of a Catholic politician’s adherence to church teaching had been settled by John F. Kennedy in 1960. As has become more evident in succeeding months, Senator Kerry’s education in Catholic teaching and practice is gravely deficient. He is not entirely to blame for that. Last year, when pressed by a reporter on how he could square his unqualified support for the unlimited abortion license with his being a Catholic, Kerry finally gave the testy response, “It’s the bishops’ problem, not mine” (see FT October 2003). That made a kind of sense. Bishops say, rightly, that they have a responsibility for the spiritual welfare, even the salvation, of those in their care. John Kerry and a host of other politicians—mainly but not exclusively Democratic—respond by saying, in effect, “How come now you are suddenly so concerned about my soul? For years and years I took the positions I take now and was considered, as I considered myself, a Catholic in good standing. Now all of a sudden bishops are saying I should refrain from or even be refused Communion.” Some politicians who say that are, I expect, feigning surprise and indignation; others are genuinely confused.

When in 1960 JFK assured the Baptist ministers of Houston that his Catholicism would have no bearing on his public conduct, bishops and other leaders in the Church privately winced but most held their tongues. So eager were Catholics to have one of their own in the White House. Since then it has become sadly evident that JFK did not let his Catholicism have much bearing on his private conduct either, and the magisterial authority of the Houston settlement of “the Catholic question” has been greatly diminished. In 1960 the Catholic question entailed few policy specifics. Aid to parochial schools and a U.S. ambassador to the Vatican were minor disputes compared with what was to come. What was to come was, above all, the 1973 Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade. Now again it is being confirmed that Roe is the most important event in our political culture of the last half century. That should not surprise. Church teaching, divine law, natural justice, clear reason, and partisan politics converge in the claim that it is intrinsically evil, it is always and everywhere wrong, to deliberately take an innocent human life.

A growing number of bishops are now accused of meddling in politics. Once again, old canards are circulating about whether Catholicism is compatible with American democracy. Some Democrats express the belief that all this will work to the benefit of Kerry and other pro-abortion politicians, permitting them to depict themselves as courageously resisting ecclesiastical authority. That is possible. After the two-year media storm over sex-abuse scandals, Catholic bishops are typecast, and not as heroes. Moreover, bishops who attempt to impose a measure of discipline are regularly asked if, their denials to the contrary notwithstanding, they are not being partisan since the discipline falls mainly on Democrats. They can correctly respond that the Democratic leadership is responsible for that party being locked into an extremist don’t-give-an-inch commitment to the unlimited abortion license. The truth is that most bishops, like most Catholics, are by disposition and history Democrats. Not so long ago, the old saw was true that Irish Catholics—and not only Irish—received, along with their baptismal certificate, a union card and enrollment in the Democratic Party. That, too, was changed by Roe and its sequelae. Today, the official position and actual leadership of the Republican Party is in agreement with Catholic teaching on the moral imperative to protect unborn children. The Democratic Party, by way of sharpest contrast, permits, at least at the national level, not one hint, not one iota, of dissent from the lethal logic of Roe.

It did not have to be this way. It is deeply troubling when, in our kind of democracy, the two major parties are so starkly polarized on the great moral question of human dignity and human rights. The last time that happened was in the mid-nineteenth century over the question of slavery, which is not a happy precedent. It is more than arguable that, if the bishops had done their duty, as many of them are now doing their duty, back in the 1960s when “liberalized abortion law” was being agitated, we would not be in our present situation. If the bishops and other Catholic leaders had then made clear in no uncertain terms that the Democratic Party’s dalliance with abortion on demand would precipitate a direct confrontation with the Church and the potential alienation of millions of Catholic voters, it seems likely that Democratic leaders would not have permitted the party’s capture by radical pro-abortionists. As improbable as it seems now, in the 1960s the Democratic Party was much more anti-abortion than the Republican. But many of the traditional party leaders were pushed aside by the 1972 “McGovern revolution,” which assigned the party’s future to its extremist factions. Nonetheless, I think it probable that the bishops could have made a difference if back then they had spoken as some of them are now, at long last, speaking

“Democrats Expel Catholics”

I remember long and melancholic conversations with the late Msgr. George Higgins, the last of the great “labor priests.” He was the Catholic chaplain, so to speak, to the AFL-CIO during the years of George Meany and Lane Kirkland. Higgins, who died in May 2002 at the age of eighty-six, spoke in tones of gratification laced with bitterness about his years of struggle to prevent the AFL-CIO from unqualifiedly endorsing Roe. With the succession of John Sweeney, another Catholic, that battle, too, was lost. George Higgins didn’t have to wait for baptism; he was genetically a Democrat. I pressed him on whether organized labor, with its huge Catholic membership, could not be moved into the pro-life column. Not a chance, he said. There was the McGovern factor, and the teachers unions, especially in New York. Moreover, the bishops would not risk a direct confrontation with labor and the Democratic Party. The best that could be done, he said, was a holding action that prevented organized labor from enlisting unqualifiedly on the other side. He lived long enough to see the collapse even of the holding action. George Higgins and I disagreed, for the most part amiably, about many things, and such was his devotion to the Democratic Party and organized labor that I am not at all sure whether, if it came to it, he would have supported such a confrontation with the Church. But he was poignantly aware that things could have turned out differently.

We are inclined to forget the state of the abortion question before Roe v. Wade. Joseph Califano, in his just-published memoir Inside: A Private and Public Life (Public Affairs, 512 pages $30)recalls the madness of the Miami Democratic convention of 1972. I was a New York delegate and well remember how the party’s radicals pressed for a resolution supporting legalized abortion. The move was turned back at the last moment by leaders, including McGovern, who knew that voters were overwhelmingly opposed to such a position. Even McGovern wasn’t prepared to be that radical. Only a few months later, in an act of “raw judicial power” (Justice Byron White), the Supreme Court wiped off the books of all fifty states every law protecting unborn children. It is not true, as Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and others have claimed, that Roe only hurried along what was already happening in the country. As was evident in elections and referenda in several states, public sentiment was moving against legalizing abortion. One can only speculate about what might have happened if bishops, in the immediate aftermath of the Court decision, had addressed Catholic Democrats in the forceful way that some are now doing. Some were vocal back then. A few years after Roe, when Senator Ted Kennedy and others led the party to an unqualified endorsement of the decision, the St. Louis archdiocesan paper carried the headline “Democrats Expel Catholics.” (Today’s archbishop of St. Louis, Raymond Burke, was among the first out of the gate in the current round of holding Catholic politicians accountable.)

Califano writes about Miami: “As I watched and listened, the convention was moving the Democratic Party from the harbor of economic issues like full employment and health care for all into the turbulent seas of cultural revolution likely to infuriate and alienate many middle-class Americans who had been the backbone of the party from Roosevelt through Johnson. How will they react, I wondered as I stood on the podium, to the effort of many delegates to establish cultural issues like abortion rights and gay liberation as litmus tests for what constitutes a national Democrat?” Such is the history to keep in mind when current critics of episcopal censures complain that they are weighted against Democrats. Had bishops been more assertive earlier, it might have prevented what Califano and others saw happening to the future of the Democratic Party. But again, it must be acknowledged that the leaders of the party with whom the bishops might be expected to have greatest influence were being rapidly displaced by the McGovern revolution.

Bishops, like most people, are often dilatory and strongly disposed toward avoiding controversy. The Catholic sensibility, as has often been noted, is not that of a dialectical either/or but of an analogical both/and. A bishop’s job rating is determined, in very large part, by his success in keeping everybody on board. This is called “the ministry of unity,” and there is a great deal to be said for it. But now episcopal hands are forced by a presidential candidate who says he is Catholic and who publicly, persistently, and defiantly rejects the Church’s teaching on the greatest moral-political question of our time. The stakes are high for the polity of the nation, but much higher for the polity of the Church. The latter is the polity that must be of preeminent concern to the bishops. Over the last several decades, and especially after the last two years of scandal, their credibility and authority have been severely battered. Wounded though they are, some bishops, maybe most bishops, know that they cannot be perceived as defaulting once again—as many did with respect to sex abuse—on their solemnly sworn duty.

No Moral Equivalence

In the present and admittedly messy circumstance, it might be suggested that their solemnly sworn duty involves, first of all, the spiritual welfare of those in their care. This entails the clear and uncompromised teaching of the faith, and correcting those who misrepresent that teaching. They have no choice but to address the public scandal and confusion created by prominent Catholics who publicly and persistently reject the Church’s teaching without apparent consequence. A bishop’s duties are internal to the life of the Church, although they obviously have external effects, including in electoral politics. Understandable concern about external effects must give way, however, to a bishop’s awareness of his responsibility qua bishop. He is the shepherd, the pastor, the teacher, of the community entrusted to his care. The presidential and congressional elections of this year are important, to be sure, but not nearly so important as the testing of the Church’s integrity in not compromising the moral truth with which she is entrusted or her responsibility for the souls committed to her care.

Different bishops are responding to the test in different ways. It is, as of this writing, uncertain whether the committee of the bishops conference charged with coming up with a proposal for a uniform response will report before the elections, and it is not unlikely that any such proposal would encounter serious disagreements among the bishops. In any event, bishops have to act now. The worry is expressed that different responses will give the impression that the bishops are not united. I am not so sure. Each bishop is the appointed teacher in his local Church, the diocese. The truth about questions of great importance has not always been well served by the assumption that the bishops must speak “as a body” through the conference. If there is agreement on what the Church teaches about the intrinsic evil of taking innocent human life in abortion, embryonic research, and euthanasia, the pastoral application of that teaching, relying on the grace of office and prudential judgment of bishops, may vary from place to place.

What is truly troubling is that some bishops are fudging the Church’s teaching by suggesting, for instance, that there is a moral equivalence between abortion, capital punishment, the war in Iraq, and a host of other disputed questions. That is false, as anybody knows who has read with care the 1995 encyclical Evangelium Vitae, the November 2002 doctrinal note from Rome on participation in political life, or the U.S. bishops’ own statement “Living the Gospel of Life,” issued in 1998. A few bishops have said that they would not use the Eucharist as an instrument for pressing politicians who publicly and persistently reject the Church’s teaching. Other bishops correctly point out that, from the beginning of the Church, immoral actions have had consequences for communion. Archbishop Charles Chaput of Denver, for instance, quotes the words of Justin Martyr from the second century: “No one may share the Eucharist with us unless he believes that what we teach is true . . . and unless he lives in accordance with the principles given us by Christ.” Chaput also quotes St. Paul who “reminds the people who are not living their lives according to the gospel of Jesus Christ and yet receive the Eucharist that they bring judgment on themselves.” Guarding the Eucharist from profanation, and souls from incurring divine judgment, is a responsibility that goes back to Christian beginnings.

There is also Canon 915 in the Code of Canon Law: “Those upon whom the penalty of excommunication or interdict has been imposed or declared, and others who obstinately persist in manifest grave sin, are not to be admitted to Holy Communion.” Canon lawyers agree that the “those” in the first part of that canon would seem to be limited to cases where there has been some kind of judicial process and public declaration. On the other hand, hundreds, if not thousands, of politicians, both Democratic and Republican, and at all levels of government, would seem to qualify as “others who obstinately persist in manifest grave sin.” It is a grave sin to knowingly, publicly, and persistently reject and encourage others to reject the moral law that it is intrinsically evil, always and everywhere wrong, to deliberately take innocent human life. This, bishops must more effectively communicate, is not a “sectarian” Catholic teaching but a moral law obliging all. To say that an unborn child is not entitled to legal protection is comparable to saying that poor people or black people are not entitled to legal protection. It is worth noting that many who are now so harshly critical of the Church cheered when, in the civil rights era, the archbishop of New Orleans excommunicated supporters of racial segregation.

“Whose Side Are You On?”

The situation of John Kerry—to take but the most obvious example—is significantly different from that of Mario Cuomo who, when governor of New York, made a speech at Notre Dame explaining why, although he did not reject the moral truth about abortion, he could not impose his convictions in the absence of a moral consensus supporting the protection of the unborn. His argument was made vacuous by the fact that he did nothing to build such a consensus—as he did, against great opposition, in opposing capital punishment—and the fact that he assiduously solicited and benefited from the support of pro-abortionists. Kerry, who has a 100 percent approval rating from pro-abortion organizations, also on partial-birth abortion, has repeatedly and publicly taken his unequivocal stand with NARAL Pro-Choice America, Planned Parenthood, and other groups that have stridently declared for decades that they view the Catholic Church as their number-one enemy. The question for Kerry and others similarly situated is inescapable: Whose side are you on?

Receiving Communion has everything to do with communio. It is not simply a matter of participating in a religious ritual but of declaring oneself in solidarity with Christ and his Church, as Catholics believe Christ constituted his Church. It is not a matter of having a problem with one or another of the Church’s teachings. Many thoughtful Catholics do, and pray for the grace of a more perfect communio. To paraphrase Newman, a thousand problems do not add up to a rejection. A bishop cannot with integrity pretend not to notice public and persistent rejection, or pretend that it has no consequences for a person’s communion with the Church. A person may believe he is acting in good conscience, and the Church teaches that even a wrongly formed conscience must be obeyed, but public rejection requires public response. Some bishops have said that offending public figures should be refused Communion, others that they should refrain from communing, until the rejection that impairs their communio has been remedied. Priests on the spot, unless under direct orders from their bishop, are rightly reluctant to deny anyone communion, since they cannot know for sure the state of the person’s inward disposition.

One bishop has said that not only pro-abortion politicians but also anyone who votes for a pro-abortion politician should refrain from communion. This is highly problematic. It would seem to ignore the distinction between an act and the intention behind the act—what in traditional language is called the difference between material and formal cooperation in a wrong. It is not hard to imagine a circumstance in which an unquestionably pro-life voter might vote for a pro-abortion politician despite that politician’s being pro-abortion. In fact, one does not have to imagine. Just this spring, pro-lifers President Bush and Senator Rick Santorum successfully urged support in the Pennsylvania primary for the pro-abortion Senator Arlen Specter in order to maintain control of the Senate and the possibility of advancing pro-life legislation. It would be an obtuse indifference to political and moral realities to suggest that Catholics who voted for Specter with that intention in mind impaired their communio with the Church.

Forty-four years after JFK at Houston, Catholicism in America is confronted by a historic moment of truth. The question is, as John Paul II has repeatedly stressed, whether, in contending for the culture of life, the Church will have the courage to be a sign of contradiction or will retreat into being a sign of conformity. The analogical sensibility of both/and is sometimes in necessary tension with the dialectical either/or. The Church as James Joyce’s “Here Comes Everybody” depends upon there being a here here. If communio is not defined, it cannot attract and will not be defended. In view of the negligence of so many bishops in the past, one can understand John Kerry’s response of last year, “It’s the bishops’ problem, not mine.” No longer. It is the bishops’ problem, to be sure, but their problem is to make clear, as they did not make clear in the past, that it is also John Kerry’s problem, and the problem of numerous other public figures who wrongly thought, perhaps because they were wrongly taught, that Communion can be detached from communio.

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Afterword: At their Denver meeting in June, the bishops did adopt, with only six dissenting votes, a succinct statement, “Catholics in Political Life.” Noting that abortion is “always intrinsically evil and can never be justified,” the bishops state that those who knowingly, freely, and consistently support abortion on demand are “guilty of grave sin and separate themselves from God’s grace.” The examination of conscience required before receiving Communion “includes fidelity to the moral teaching of the Church in personal and public life.” In relating to Catholics in political life, the bishops commit themselves to teach, counsel, and persuade. The decision to refuse Communion in certain cases rests with individual bishops who may “legitimately make different judgments on the most prudent course of pastoral action.” In the intense deliberation, Archbishop Charles Chaput of Denver and Francis Cardinal George of Chicago were among those who, supported by a written intervention from Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, provided distinguished leadership in turning back minority proposals to delay a statement by consigning the task to the bureaucratic processes of the bishops conference. Following the vote, Roger Cardinal Mahony issued a statement reiterating his position that pro-abortion politicians are welcome to receive Communion in Los Angeles. Theodore Cardinal McCarrick of Washington offered a distinctive interpretation of the statement, saying that the message is that the battle over abortion “should be fought not at the communion rail but in the public square.” But, of course, the whole point of the statement is to address the necessary connection between Communion and communio. Some observers deplore the outcome of the Denver meeting as a splintering of episcopal unity; others view it as a welcome, if belated, sign that bishops are prepared to assume leadership as teachers and pastors in their local churches. Many bishops, we are told, welcomed the more free and open deliberation at Denver, which was in sharp contrast to meetings in which bishops are closely tutored in processing the preprogrammed positions of the USCCB leadership and staff.