By JUDIE BROWN
A look back in time is helpful. Apparently when it comes to culture war battles over sins of the flesh such as abortion, contraception, in vitro fertilization and homosexuality among others, most Bishops are in line with American Catholics. They back away.
We decided to analyze this phenomenon in the light of the sexual abuse scandals plaguing the Catholic Church today, and here is what we found.
When American Life League launched our Canon 915 project in 2002, we did it at the request of our spiritual director, Fr. James Buckley, FSSP. In discussing the tragic disconnect between Catholic bishops and those in political and public life who say they are Catholic but support abortion, Father introduced us to the facts about Canon Law 915 and why the bishops had, for the most part, failed to obey this Church law.
He said in an email: “It is a duty in charity to warn not only pro-abortion Catholic legislators not to receive Communion but to instruct priests and Eucharistic ministers not to give such people Communion. We must, as St. Peter said, obey God rather than men.”
We knew Father was right. We also felt certain that every priest and bishop would concur if they thought about it logically. We were wrong!
It became clear almost immediately that most bishops were on a bad road. They were ignoring the elephant in the room — those Catholic in name only pols who consistently supported the killing of preborn babies without apology.
So we began the Canon 915 campaign in earnest, asking Catholic bishops to obey canon law and deny the Eucharist to those in public life who were supporting abortion. We encountered pushback the likes of wish we certainly did not expect. It came not only from bishops and cardinals but their assistants as well.
I still recall the 2003 episode with Roger Cardinal Mahony and his media man, Tod Tamberg. We ran an ad asking Mahony to deny Holy Eucharist to gubernatorial, pro-abortion candidates Arnold Schwarzenegger, Cruz Bustamante, and Gray Davis. In response, Tamberg said: “The reception of Holy Communion by Catholics is a right guaranteed by the church and not a privilege” (Saving Those Damned Catholics, p. 195).
As shameful as this comment was, it was the type of excuse that not only Mahony but many prelates used to avoid defending Christ from sacrilege. These bishops and many priests did not want to reach out to pro-abortion Catholics with a goal of helping them save their souls by explaining why they would be denied Holy Eucharist and why.
We never understood this because the truth was then and is now that it is a privilege to receive the Body of Christ but first, we are required to be free of serious sin. Canon Law 915 says, those who are “obstinately persevering in manifest grave sin are not to be admitted to Holy Communion.”
Supporting the direct killing of preborn children by acts of abortion is a manifest grave sin. Therefore it should be the obligation of every priest, Eucharistic minister, deacon, and bishop to make sure that public figures who support such an act are not allowed to receive the Body and Blood of Christ until they have publicly repented of their support for such killing.
On the subject of such serious sins, these profound words of St. John Paul II, written in 1984 in the Reconciliation and Penance apostolic exhortation, should resounded with every Catholic bishop:
“Whenever the Church speaks of situations of sin or when she condemns as social sins certain situations or the collective behavior of certain social groups, big or small, or even of whole nations and blocs of nations, she knows, and she proclaims that such cases of social sin are the result of the accumulation and concentration of many personal sins. It is a case of the very personal sins of those who cause or support evil or who exploit it; of those who are in a position to avoid, eliminate, or at least limit certain social evils but who fail to do so out of laziness, fear, or the conspiracy of silence, through secret complicity or indifference; of those who take refuge in the supposed impossibility of changing the world and also of those who sidestep the effort and sacrifice required, producing specious reasons of higher order. The real responsibility, then, lies with individuals.”
Indeed, the real responsibility for teaching truth, for defending Christ from sacrilege and for taking direct action when so-called Catholics are known to be advocating sins such as abortion is not a choice but should be a requirement for any ordained priest.
Pope John Paul II could well have been writing about the public acceptance among Catholics of abortion, contraception, in vitro fertilization, euthanasia, sex outside of marriage, and even homosexual acts as social sins that began with the false reasoning of individuals.
While Catholic shepherds are called to help the laity understand the seriousness of such sins of the flesh and the reasons why they are offensive to God and heinous in nature, many have chosen not to address this, leading in my view to the crisis the Church faces today.
In 2018 we are finally hearing one of the pivotal reasons why, for so many years, prelates and priests have avoided dealing honestly with sins of the flesh. Msgr. Charles Pope, among others, explains that the sexual abuse scandal cannot be divorced from the problem of homosexuals in the priesthood. He writes (see the National Catholic Register, August 18, 2018):
“The Sixth Commandment is clear — there is a universal call to chastity, and no one is exempt. There is simply no provision for sexual intercourse or sexual touching outside of valid marriage, and those who are married live chastity by complete fidelity to one another. No one is ever permitted under any circumstances to engage in sexual acts with anyone to whom they are not validly married. There are no separate rules for heterosexuals or homosexuals. There is to be no sexual intercourse or touching outside of valid marriage.
“And this of course leads to the most-avoided topic related to this scandal — the problem of active homosexuality in the priesthood.
“An honest discussion of this current crisis cannot avoid addressing the issue — shouts of homophobia, intolerance, bigotry, and scapegoating notwithstanding.
“It is evident that the vast majority of the cases involving both the sexual abuse of minors and of adults involve male victims. The 2004 John Jay Report (The Nature and Scope of the Problem of Sexual Abuse of Minors by Catholic Priests and Deacons in the United States), which was commissioned by the U.S. bishops themselves, found that 81 percent of the victims were male and 78 percent of all victims were post-pubescent. Thus, though legally still minors, they were sexually mature in the physical sense.
“So, the large majority of cases involved attraction by homosexuals to young men who, though legally minors, were physically and sexually mature males, not little children. This is not pedophilia. It is homosexual attraction. Regarding the sexual abuse and harassment of seminarians or priests by bishops or other clergy, obviously 100 percent of those victims were male.
“In summary, the large majority of the cases involve sexual misbehavior by priests with same-sex attraction.”
Bishop Robert Morlino (1946-2018) wrote of the homosexual subculture “within the hierarchy of the Catholic Church.”
Raymond Cardinal Burke said that it is time to admit there is a homosexual culture within the Catholic priesthood including the hierarchy. He pointed out: “I think it has been considerably aggravated by the anti-life culture in which we live, namely the contraceptive culture that separates the sexual act from the conjugal union. The sexual act has no meaning whatsoever except between a man and a woman in marriage since the conjugal act is by its very nature for procreation.”
And there it is!
Obviously in retrospect we can see that choosing not to protect Christ from sacrilege by giving Communion to public figures who are complicit in abortion killing is directly related to the overall crisis within the Church on matters of sexuality.
I cannot help but think that in some way our call to obey a simple canon law somehow helped expose this tragic situation which we are finally openly confronting in the public square.
The very root causes of the sexual abuse scandal have been exposed at long last. You see, we were right.
Defending Christ from sacrilege by denying the Eucharist to public sinners should not be hard, but when the sexual act itself is perverted, then the results of that perversion including the aborting of millions of children becomes collateral damage.
As Msgr. Pope says , “If our bishops are not willing to engage a full and honest airing of all the causes, the anger of God’s people will only increase, and the credibility of the bishops and the Church will sink from near zero to absolute zero.”
It is time for the bishops to confront the truth.
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