GetReligion
Thursday, April 03, 2025

America magazine

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Private conversations, public debates: Concerning bishops, Joe Biden and Holy Communion

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Private conversations, public debates: Concerning bishops, Joe Biden and Holy Communion

Asked if he discussed abortion with Pope Francis during their recent Vatican summit, President Joe Biden said: "No, it didn't. It came up – we just talked about the fact he was happy that I was a good Catholic, and I should keep receiving Communion."

The next day, the Associated Press noted that Biden received Holy Communion at St. Patrick's Church in Rome.

Asked to validate the president's second-hand quotation, Vatican spokesman Matteo Bruni told reporters: "I would consider it a private conversation."

What do U.S. bishops think? That has remained a hot topic as the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops braces for its fall 2021 meetings next week (Nov. 15-18) in Baltimore – its first in-person assembly since the start of the coronavirus pandemic.

What is labeled as "draft 24" of a proposed USCCB statement on "Eucharistic coherence" flashes back to an earlier controversy about Catholic politicians, Holy Communion and an atmosphere of "scandal" among the faithful.

"We repeat what the U.S. bishops stated in 2006: 'If a Catholic in his or her personal or professional life were knowingly and obstinately to reject the defined doctrines of the Church, or knowingly and obstinately to repudiate her definitive teaching on moral issues, he or she would seriously diminish his or her communion with the Church," said this draft from late September – first obtained by The Pillar, a Catholic news website.

The quote continued: " 'Reception of Holy Communion in such a situation would not accord with the nature of the Eucharistic celebration, so that he or she should refrain.' "

As insiders have predicted, this draft of "The Mystery of the Eucharist in the Life of the Church" doesn't mention debates about the sacramental status of Catholic politicians who have consistently served as advocates for abortion rights, such as Biden or House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

It does, however, connect some dots on this subject, while drawing from the writings of Pope Francis.


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Pope Francis lashes out at conservative Catholic press, calls its criticism 'work of the Devil'

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Pope Francis lashes out at conservative Catholic press, calls its criticism 'work of the Devil'

Pope Francis is no fan of press criticism — especially when it comes from Roman Catholic news outlets on the doctrinal right.

So here we go again, with another round of tensions in the growing world of Catholic media.

The 84-year-old Argentinian-born pontiff was caught in a candid moment during his recent trip to Slovakia when he was asked about his health after a recent operation.

“Still alive,” the pope replied, “even though some people wanted me to die.”

The shocking statement came in a meeting the pope had with 53 Jesuits from Slovakia on Sept. 12 in Bratislava. Antonio Spadaro, a priest and editor-in-chief of the Rome-based Jesuit magazine La Civiltà Cattolica, was present at the meeting and on Sept. 21 published the full transcript of the conversation.

The comments immediately sparked a Catholic media war that again highlighted how polarized Catholics have become during Francis’ papacy, as have the official and independent church media that a large swarth of parishioners choose to read.

Asked by another Jesuit at the same gathering how he felt by those who view him with suspicion, Francis replied:

There is, for example, a large Catholic television channel that has no hesitation in continually speaking ill of the pope. I personally deserve attacks and insults because I am a sinner, but the church does not deserve them. They are the work of the devil. I have also said this to some of them.

The TV channel to which he referred is EWTN, according to the National Catholic Reporter.

The Eternal World Television Network was founded in 1980 by a nun named Mother Angelica and began broadcasting a year later from a garage at the Our Lady of the Angels Monastery in Irondale, Alabama. Since then, it has grown to become one of the largest and most influential Catholic news organizations in North America and around the world.


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Facebook decides -- following clicks and $$$ -- that it should encourage online prayer

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Facebook decides -- following clicks and $$$ -- that it should encourage online prayer

There are 2.4 billion Christians in the world today, according to most estimates.

Then again, nearly 3 billion people have Facebook accounts. Nearly 70% of U.S. adults use this social-media platform, which recently passed $1 trillion in market capitalization.

"I will use Facebook to reach people, because you almost have to do that," Father Andrew Stephen Damick, chief content officer for Ancient Faith Ministries, a 24-hour source for online radio channels, podcasts, weblogs, forums and more. The ministry was born in 2004 and is now part of the North American archdiocese of the ancient Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch.

Facebook remains, he noted, "the No. 1 social-media platform in the world – by a lot. You can't ignore all those people. … We knew this before COVID, but the pandemic made it impossible to deny the obvious. Everyone had to go online, one way or another."

Facebook Live became a way to stream worship services online, even if all a pastor could do was mount a smartphone on a stand. Even small congregations began holding online religious-education classes, support groups and leadership meetings.

As for worship, it was one thing for Protestant megachurches to stream TV-friendly services built on pop-rock Christian music and charismatic preaching. The online options were more problematic for faiths in which worship centered on the smells, bells, images and tastes of ancient liturgies.

Then, in early June, images began circulating of a Twitter message introducing "Prayer Posts" allowing Facebook users to "enable group members to ask for and respond to prayers" with a few clicks in a page's control settings. Participation could be as simple as a user clicking an "I prayed" button linked to a prayer.

This isn't a totally new idea. The Facebook "Prayer Warriors" group already has 865,700 active members, a flock larger than the average of 518,000 Episcopalians that attended services on an average Sunday in 2019, according to the denomination's statistics.


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Why does no one, including the New Yorker, want to address the Catholicity of Joe Manchin?

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Why does no one, including the New Yorker, want to address the Catholicity of Joe Manchin?

The New Yorker always has interesting profiles and I got to reading one about West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, a conservative Democrat who is the one bulwark in the U.S. Senate against a Republican majority.

That is, in a Senate divided 50/50, Manchin is the swing vote on the Democratic side. And he has been known to oppose the hopes and dreams of the Democratic Party’s center-left coalition.

So lots of people are writing about him, including the New Yorker, which bent over backward to avoid talking about one of the inner strengths that Manchin has: His determination to be a Catholic politician, even in an age in which compromise is all but impossible.

Tmatt has covered Manchin beforehand and these days, Manchin is very much in the headlines these days because if anything, the diference between two major parties is massive.

The story begins with a near-fatal accident involving two Senators, one of them Manchin.

In another year, the prospect of losing two Democratic senators overboard in an ice storm might be greeted with a certain wry resignation among Washington’s political class. This year, it inspires panic, at least among Democrats: in a 50-50 Senate, the Party’s agenda is only one vote — or one heartbeat — from oblivion. Manchin, in particular, holds extraordinary power.

As perhaps the Senate’s most conservative Democrat, he often breaks from the Party, which gives him a de-facto veto over a large swath of the Administration’s agenda. In the first months of Joe Biden’s Presidency, Manchin tanked the nomination of Neera Tanden as budget director (he disapproved of her tweets), opposed raising the corporate tax rate to twenty-eight per cent (he preferred twenty-five per cent), and single-handedly narrowed unemployment benefits in a COVID-relief bill.

Over and over, Manchin said that he was driven by a fundamental faith in bipartisanship, a belief that Democrats could and must find Republican support for their legislation—a posture so at odds with the present hostilities in Washington that it evoked a man hoisting his glass for a toast while his guests lunged at one another with steak knives…

Biden and Manchin have obvious points in common—two white, Catholic Joes, in their seventies, both former football players who take pride in their working-class roots, long after becoming wealthy.

What drives Manchin, what gives him the courage to stand alone as he so often does?


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U.S. Catholic bishops OK drafting Communion guidelines: Press asks about politics -- period

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U.S. Catholic bishops OK drafting Communion guidelines: Press asks about politics -- period

Any short list of classic Pope Francis remarks about abortion would have to include the 2018 speech in which he asked, using a Mafia image: “Is it just to resort to a contract killer to solve a problem?”

There was more: “Interrupting a pregnancy is like eliminating someone. Getting rid of a human being is like resorting to a contract killer to solve a problem.” While some people support abortion rights, Francis added: “How can an act that suppresses innocent and defenseless life as it blossoms be therapeutic, civil or simply human?”

Or how about this quote, drawn from a 2020 address to the United Nations?

“Unfortunately, some countries and international institutions are also promoting abortion as one of the so-called ‘essential services’ provided in the humanitarian response to the pandemic. … It is troubling to see how simple and convenient it has become for some to deny the existence of a human life as a solution to problems that can and must be solved for both the mother and her unborn child.”

While there is no question that Pope Francis is a progressive on many issues linked to economics, immigration and other political topics, he has continued — sometimes in blunt language involving evil and the demonic — to defend the basics of Catholic moral theology.

So what are readers supposed to make of the Sunday New York Times story that opens with this summary statement:

WASHINGTON — Pope Francis and President Biden, both liberals, are the two most high-profile Roman Catholics in the world.

But in the United States, neither of these men is determining the direction of the Catholic Church. It is now a conservative movement that decides how the Catholic Church asserts its power in America.

Perhaps that is a bit simplistic?

The context, of course, was the decision by U.S. Catholic bishops — after three days of contentious debate — to approve a measure on to draft a statement that could deny Holy Communion to pro-abortion-rights politicians like President Joe Biden.


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Thinking about 1962: Catholic politicos, an archbishop, excommunication, doctrine and race

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Thinking about 1962: Catholic politicos, an archbishop, excommunication, doctrine and race

The equation was rather remarkable.

First you had some Catholic politicians who — in words and deeds — kept defying church teachings on an important and controversial topic in public life.

Then you had an archbishop who faced a tough decision about whether to do anything, beyond verbal warnings, to show them he was willing to defend these church teachings on moral theology and the sacraments.

When the archbishop stepped up and punished the politicos, denying them Holy Communion and more, the mainstream press — CBS and The New York Times, even — openly backed his actions with positive coverage.

Wait, what was that last thing?

Right now, the U.S. Catholic bishops are headed deeper into a showdown over the status of President Joe Biden and other Catholics who openly — through word and deed — defy church teachings on abortion, marriage, gender and other issues in which doctrines are defined in the Catholic Catechism and centuries of church tradition.

As part of the discussion this past week, America magazine — a strategic voice for Catholic progressives — can this fascinating essay: “What a 60-year-old excommunication controversy tells us about calls to deny Biden Communion.” It was written by Peter Feuerherd, a journalism professor at St. John's University in New York City. Here’s the overture:

In April 1962, Archbishop Joseph Rummel of New Orleans not only denied Communion to three Catholics in his archdiocese; he went a step beyond. At 86 years of age and in ill health — he would die two years later — he formally excommunicated the three, who vehemently opposed his efforts to desegregate Catholic schools.


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Bishops debate 'Eucharistic coherence,' a matter of doctrine, politics and eternal judgement

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Bishops debate 'Eucharistic coherence,' a matter of doctrine, politics and eternal judgement

Archbishop Joseph Cordileone leads the Archdiocese of San Francisco, a symbolic city in debates about modern American culture.

But what matters the most, as tensions rise among Catholic leaders, is that Cordileone is House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's hometown bishop. Thus, it's hard for politicos to avoid blunt passages in his new pastoral letter, "Before I Formed You in the Womb I Knew You."

Citing centuries of church doctrine, the archbishop argued that Catholics who "reject the teaching of the Church on the sanctity of human life and those who do not seek to live in accordance with that teaching should not receive the Eucharist. It is fundamentally a question of integrity: to receive the Blessed Sacrament in the Catholic liturgy is to espouse publicly the faith and moral teachings of the Catholic Church, and to desire to live accordingly."

There is, he added, "a great difference between struggling to live according to the teachings of the Church and rejecting those teachings. … In the case of public figures who profess to be Catholic and promote abortion, we are not dealing with a sin committed in human weakness or a moral lapse: this is a matter of persistent, obdurate and public rejection of Catholic teaching. This adds an even greater responsibility to the role of the Church's pastors in caring for the salvation of souls."

Citing a famous example, Cordileone recalled when former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani received Holy Communion during a 2008 Mass led by Pope Benedict XVI. This caused scandal and, according to the late Cardinal Edward Egan, violated an agreement that Giuliani would not receive the Sacrament because of his public support for abortion rights and other clashes with doctrine.

The big issue, as U.S. bishops prepare for June discussions of "Eucharistic coherence," is not how to handle a former New York City mayor. The question is whether bishops can address their own divisions about the status of pro-abortion-rights Catholics such as Pelosi and President Joe Biden. While vice president, Biden also performed two same-sex marriage rites.

San Diego Bishop Robert McElroy, firing back at Cordileone in America magazine, stressed that the "Eucharist must never be instrumentalized for a political end. … But that is precisely what is being done in the effort to exclude Catholic political leaders who oppose the church's teaching on abortion and civil law. The Eucharist is being weaponized and deployed as a tool in political warfare. This must not happen."


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Once again, AP accuses big Catholic bosses of abusing government coronavirus relief efforts

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Once again, AP accuses big Catholic bosses of abusing government coronavirus relief efforts

There they go again.

In this case, “they” refers to whoever is in charge of religion-news coverage these days at the Associated Press. Someone there needs to take a remedial course in (a) church history, (b) church-state law in the United States or (c) both.

Let’s start by flashing back about six months, when the AP rolled out an investigation of what its editors clearly thought was a scandal of epic proportions. Does anyone remember this lede, and this GetReligion dissection (“AP explains why it was wrong for local-level Catholic employees to get coronavirus relief money“), of the expose)?

NEW YORK (AP) — The U.S. Roman Catholic Church used a special and unprecedented exemption from federal rules to amass at least $1.4 billion in taxpayer-backed coronavirus aid, with many millions going to dioceses that have paid huge settlements or sought bankruptcy protection because of clergy sexual abuse cover-ups.

That was a bizarre, but honest, opener. The entire story was built on the assumption that there is such a thing — corporately and legally speaking — as a “U.S. Roman Catholic Church.”

As I said at the time, this is “like saying that there is an ‘American Public School System,’ as opposed to complex networks of schools at the local, regional and state levels.” One could also note that there is a Planned Parenthood of America. However, government coronavirus aid in the paycheck-support program went to 37 regional and local Planned Parenthood groups.

The Associated Press has now produced a sequel, with this headline: “Sitting on billions, Catholic dioceses amassed taxpayer aid.” While the editors avoided the “U.S. Roman Catholic Church” label this time around, this lengthy story is built on a similar misunderstanding of what happened when Catholic parishes, schools, nonprofits and other ministries applied for coronavirus aid.

As readers can see in the headline, in the sequel AP leaders focused on finances at the diocesan level, as opposed to a mythical national Catholic structure. This is closer to the truth, but it still misses the mark. While many issues of church authority are linked to local bishops, in local dioceses, the crucial issue here was paycheck-relief money reaching staff members in individual parishes, schools and ministries that had been rocked by falling donations during the COVID-19 crisis. Let’s start with the overture:


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Watch what Biden does, not what he says: Executive orders will widen rift within U.S. bishops

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Watch what Biden does, not what he says: Executive orders will widen rift within U.S. bishops

Can you feel the unity yet? That’s the joke among political conservatives as the Biden administration closed out its first week.

Within hours of taking the oath of office on his family’s massive Bible, President Joe Biden signed a raft of executive orders — something that went on in the ensuing days — to undo strategic executive moves during Donald Trump’s presidency. During that process, Biden fan afoul of traditional Catholic teachings and, once again, placed the spotlight on his Catholic faith.

Political and religious conservatives (not always the same thing) can agree that Biden’s actions over the past week didn’t foster unity. If anything, this blitz of activity highlighted the differences between two ever-divergent Catholic camps in this country, something that revealed itself on Day 1 among the U.S. bishops and across the Atlantic Ocean in Rome as a result of dueling statements and the polemics it unleashed, all of which pointed to old fights and old wounds. Can you say “Theodore McCarrick”?

Biden, the first Roman Catholic president since John F. Kennedy in 1960, is often identified as “devout” (click here for background), when journalists describe his faith. Of course, the doctrinal side of Biden’s piety isn’t something journalists dig into. We don’t know what is in Biden’s heart or even his head.

But here is the key point for journalists and news readers: What we do know — as is the case with every politician — is what he does and says. Options about church teachings on marriage and sexuality are one thing. Biden’s decision to perform an actual gay union rite represented open conflict with the teachings of his church.

Journalists can (and should) report and show where there is overlap regarding church teachings and where there is clear contradiction. The Religious Left will soon learn that it shouldn’t hitch their wagon to any political ideology. The Religious Right learned that the hard way with Trump — something that could take years to unspool when it comes to credibility.

With Biden being a Democrat, however, I don’t expect the mainstream press to do any of this. Instead, we see puff pieces from The New York Times calling Biden “perhaps the most religiously observant commander in chief in half a century.” Guess they forgot that George W. Bush was a born-again Christian who regularly attended services. What about Jimmy Carter’s decades teaching Sunday school?

Here’s the key excerpt from that very feature that ran this past Saturday:


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