By DEXTER DUGGAN
It’s publicly obstinate pro-abortion politicians themselves who use the Eucharist as a political weapon when they persist in receiving Christ in this sacrament, despite the damage inflicted on their own souls and the public scandal they give with this unworthy reception.
That was one of the points that emerged in a 25-minute video interview released in late March with Raymond Leo Cardinal Burke that was conducted by Thomas McKenna, president of Catholic Action for Faith and Family, based in San Diego. (See The Wanderer, April 8, 2021, p. 1A.)
Burke, formerly the head of the Vatican’s Supreme Court, said the question thereby is raised about such a politician being “in a state at least of apostasy,” for which a canonical penalty needs to be considered that would be excommunication.
Pro-abortionists often have claimed that to deny such a politician the Eucharist is to “weaponize” the sacrament, but the cardinal said the truth is exactly the opposite, and to be denied the Eucharist actually is in the good interest of the politician’s own spiritual welfare.
Shortly after this video was released, the bishop of the Catholic Diocese of Phoenix, Thomas Olmsted, issued a 30-page apostolic letter on the reality of Christ in the Eucharist, an extended reflection that also directly addressed the necessity to deny the sacrament to unrepentant Catholic pro-abortion politicians.
In Veneremur Cernui — Down in Adoration Falling, Olmsted wrote that “the Church requires Catholic leaders who have publicly supported gravely immoral laws such as abortion and euthanasia to refrain from receiving Holy Communion until they publicly repent and receive the Sacrament of Penance. Not all moral issues have the same weight as abortion and euthanasia.”
During the video with Burke, McKenna began this topic at 13:13 when he said that as president, Joe Biden “is professing and highlighting that he’s a practicing Catholic,” a claim echoed by his press secretary, who says “Biden takes his faith seriously.”
This is despite Biden’s strong activism to promote and expand massive permissive abortion and tax funding for it both in the U.S. and around the world, as well as his promoting other serious moral evils in nations.
Archbishop Joseph Naumann, head of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Committee on Pro-Life Activities, “has made some very good statements calling him out” on promoting abortion while claiming to be a devout Catholic, McKenna said as he asked Burke what else might be done.
The cardinal replied there are “two things that should be done immediately.”
First, a politician who obstinately and publicly denies the truths of the faith or the moral law shouldn’t come forward for the Eucharist, and the sacramental minister should decline to administer it, Burke said, because the “crime of procured abortion is a grievous violation against the first precepts of the moral law.”
There are other such issues, too, Burke said, including “the integrity of the family. Also, he’s threatened to act against religious freedom.”
Burke cited Biden’s insistence on legally hounding the Little Sisters of the Poor for their opposition to providing contraception and abortifacients in their health insurance.
The nuns simply are practicing conformity to Church law in administering their community.
Because receiving the Body of Christ knowingly in a state of serious sin is a sacrilege, Burke said, the recipient “eats his own condemnation” — a reference to St. Paul’s words in the Bible — and gives public scandal.
This raises the second aspect, Burke said, the recipient’s “aggressive way” for a crime like procured abortion, putting the politician “in a state at least of apostasy,” for which a canonical penalty needs to be considered that would be excommunication.
Two conservative Catholic commentators contacted by The Wanderer for their reaction applauded the cardinal for raising the prospect of excommunication due to the grave scandal Biden causes as president.
Northern California television and radio media veteran Barbara Simpson said on April 7: “Finally! It’s refreshing that Cardinal Burke is considering excommunication for public figures who flout Catholic rules and guidelines and still wear their religion like a badge. I hope he goes through with it and that other clergy do the same. ‘Average’ Catholics need to know the clergy is ‘with’ us!”
Mary Ann Kreitzer, who runs the Virginia-based Les Femmes — The Truth blog, said on April 5: “Excommunication of Biden, Pelosi, Tim Kaine, and all the other Catholic pro-abortion politicians who generally support same-sex sodomy, same sex ‘marriage,’ etc., is long overdue. The problem is that many of the shepherds responsible for the souls of these apostates either support leftism or don’t want to create an unpleasant situation for themselves.
“Since Biden lives in the Archdiocese of Washington, D.C., Wilton Gregory is his spiritual father,” Kreitzer said. “Does anyone think Gregory, a longtime champion of many moral evils, will act? Of course he won’t! So Biden goes on calling himself a ‘devout Catholic’ and scandalizing the flock. But even more horrifying for Biden himself is that he is digging a deeper and deeper hole directly to Hell. Does no one care about his eternal destiny?
“Excommunication is a strong medicine and he needs it! Many of our bad bishops say they don’t want to ‘politicize the Eucharist,’ but that’s exactly what they do by allowing the ongoing sacrilege against the Body and Blood of our Savior,” she said. “And who were/are those bishops? Theodore McCarrick is a most egregious example. Can anyone believe McCarrick, sunk in his own depravity, would call out powerful members of his flock?
“In 1990 Bishop René Gracida of Corpus Christi formally excommunicated an abortionist and the director of an abortuary,” Kreitzer said. “He urged his fellow bishops to directly confront this serious moral evil in their own dioceses by taking similar action against their local Catholic abortionists. The response? Crickets! Sadly, we do not have a manly clergy defending us on the battlefield.
“We mostly have clerical politicians more interested in protecting their own turf, especially the collection basket,” she said. “And so they pay human respect to rich and powerful public sinners. It’s our modern equivalent of selling indulgences. The laity need to start inundating Wilton Gregory’s chancery with letters demanding Biden’s excommunication and having Masses said for both Cardinal Gregory and President Biden.
“Some demons can only be driven out by prayer and fasting,” Kreitzer said. “Let’s do it!”
During his video with McKenna, Burke said many people ask him — and they’re not only Catholics or even those who agree with the Church on abortion — “How can this be? It doesn’t make sense” to give the Eucharist to such a defiant public figure. How can the Church give this sacrament “to a public promoter of this evil?. . . It’s not only a sin against faith . . . but even against reason.”
Burke and McKenna agreed on the need to pray for Biden’s conversion, wishing for “his ultimate good.”
Denying politicians the Eucharist in the current circumstances is not at all a political weapon, Burke said. He added that instead the sacrament is used for their own political ends by public figures who falsely claim to be devout Catholics, “so as to gain support of Catholics.”
Pro-life official Archbishop Naumann “is giving wonderful leadership” here, Burke said. “Let’s hope we hear a whole chorus of bishops . . . giving the same message to their faithful.”
Naumann, in an interview posted February 13 at The Catholic World Report, was asked, “Mr. Biden professes to be a devout Catholic, yet is 100 percent pro-choice on abortion. How do you think America’s bishops ought to respond to this situation?”
The archbishop replied, in part: “I can tell you how this bishop is responding. The president should stop defining himself as a devout Catholic, and acknowledge that his view on abortion is contrary to Catholic moral teaching. It would be a more honest approach from him to say he disagreed with his Church on this important issue and that he was acting contrary to Church teaching.
“When he says he is a devout Catholic, we bishops have the responsibility to correct him,” Naumann said.
Such correction was evident in Veneremur Cernui (pp. 17-19), the apostolic exhortation on the Eucharist by Olmsted, the Phoenix bishop, who said that a common error these days is to presume that everyone has a right to receive Holy Communion because Jesus “welcomed all sinners.”
However, Olmsted cited the teaching of the Twelve Apostles and of St. Paul against unworthily receiving the Eucharist, and of St. Thomas Aquinas saying unworthy reception makes the Bread of Life into the bread of death.
“When one receives Holy Communion unworthily,” Olmsted said, “the sacrament becomes a sacrilege; the spiritual medicine becomes for that person — it is frightful to say — a form of spiritual poison.”
“The Church teaches that abortion or euthanasia is an intrinsically grave sin and that there is a grave and clear obligation for all Catholics to oppose them by conscientious objection,” Olmsted said.
He cited the words of St. John Paul II in the encyclical Evangelium Vitae: “In the case of an intrinsically unjust law, such as a law permitting abortion or euthanasia, it is therefore never licit to obey it, or to ‘take part in a propaganda campaign in favor of such a law or vote for it’.”
Regarding showing proper respect, Olmsted offered the example of a woman who “was living in an irregular marriage” and conscientiously declined to receive the Eucharist, because she didn’t want to show irreverence or contempt, even though she attended weekly Mass with her children and was a Eucharistic adorer.
“There are situations when we can honor God more by abstaining from Holy Communion than by satisfying a personal desire to sacramentally receive Him in Communion,” Olmsted said.
Meanwhile, in an entirely separate issue with serious implications for Biden, the Republican-majority Arizona State Senate continued to spar with the Republican-majority Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, whose county seat is Phoenix, over an audit of the reported 2.1 million county votes cast in the 2020 presidential election.
Biden officially was declared narrowly to have won Arizona. The possibility that an audit would reverse the results and declare Donald Trump the winner here stirred speculation that other battleground states where Biden was called the victor under debatable circumstances might reexamine their results, too.
The Maricopa board of supervisors’ reluctance over the audit was considered an effort to maintain Biden as the winner. Arizona’s powerful McCain Machine supported Biden in 2020. John McCain’s widow, Cindy, and his former Senate teammate, Jeff Flake, both backed Biden, and Arizona GOP Gov. Doug Ducey, long in the McCain orbit, rushed to help have him named as winner.
The independent Capitol Media Services reported: “Senate President Karen Fann said Maricopa County officials may be balking at cooperating with an audit of the 2020 presidential election results because they fear what it might turn up. ‘I’m beginning to wonder if they’re not as confident in their (election) system as they say they are,’ Fann told Capitol Media Services on Friday (April 2).”
Securely Maintained?
The Wanderer asked two Republican activists if they were confident the ballots had been securely maintained during the five months since the election.
GOP political consultant Constantin Querard said that “I do think the ballots have been securely kept. Maricopa County keeps the ballots under lock and key, and they know the eyes of the world are on their actions, so I’d wager they have been fairly meticulous in how the ballots have been stored prior to any sort of outside audit.”
However, Rob Haney, a retired chairman of the Maricopa County Republican Party, said he had no confidence the ballots had been preserved accurately, or that an audit will be accurate.
Haney also was pessimistic over the United States’ future. “I already believe that we have lost our country, and it’s just a matter of time,” he said. “It’s Germany in 1933 or 1935,” a reference to when Adolf Hitler’s National Socialists assembled their power.
“I don’t believe God is going to save our country,” said Haney, adding that if God intended to do so, He would have in the 2020 election, and courts would have come to the defense of accuracy.
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