By FR. KEVIN M. CUSICK
There is nothing to debate.
Abortion is killing and a grave moral evil, thus supporting it is also gravely wrong and sinful.
Communion is for the growth in grace for those in a state of grace. A person who supports abortion is not in a state of grace. Confession is the sacrament of which Catholics who are pro-abortion stand in need. Not Communion.
So, there’s actually nothing to debate. (See p. 1A for an update on the bishops’ plans for their June meeting.)
But, because in the sad state of the Church today bishops are divided, the debate is about whether to stop debating about giving Communion to pro-abortion politicians. The bishops’ inaction, and in some cases their active cooperation, has given birth to the pro-abortion Catholic President Biden who takes Communion at Holy Mass. Up until now the cancer of Catholic apostasy coupled with hypocrisy had risen only to the level of Nancy Pelosi, speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. She isn’t in the news quite as often as the single most powerful man in the world who lives in the White House.
Bishops have dithered over many other cases like hers over the years. All the while so-called Catholic politicians like Pelosi laugh all the way to the victory podium following election after election by securing the very important Catholic Democrat swing vote.
The collusion of weak and feckless bishops has enabled these imposters.
Now, the problem has exploded into constant public view, compounding the scandal. President Biden, a baptized Catholic, attends Mass rather regularly on Sundays as required by divine law. Some divine laws he doesn’t seem to have a problem with: those which aren’t likely to jeopardize voter support in elections.
Abortion, however, since the Supreme Court gave the green light to legalizing child murder in 1973, has served for all these many years as a political football. And a very lucrative business. Which is where the politicians come in.
Money can buy votes. And this is true for abortion and Planned Parenthood (sic). Millions of dollars a year go through this source of banned parenthood to politicians who return the favor by supporting abortion. And the cycle continues. So America and Democrats in particular have a considerable addiction to charging money for killing preborn babies. Many of them are minorities in what few have the courage to call an ongoing black genocide.
Now that the pro-abortion Democrat machine, which has been coddled and accommodated all these years by enabling bishops, has coughed up this pro-abortion president, the bishops have the biggest imaginable mess on their hands. The one man with the greatest national focus, the leader of the free world, a baptized Catholic who opposes the Church on the most central moral questions, is publicly and regularly scandalizing millions by receiving Communion at Catholic Mass for all to see.
The bishops have delayed the needed discussion on the matter by their inaction and lack of resolve. Catholic teaching is clear and there should never have been any dithering to begin with. But now, here we are, with a scandal of monstrous proportions about a matter of truth debating about which is itself a scandal.
On the day of his inauguration the first discordant note in regard to the evil promoted by Biden was sounded by the bishops in their public statement of muted congratulations. And it has only grown since then.
Archbishop Gomez’s statement on behalf of the bishops included this reprimand: “…the nation’s bishops are given the duty of proclaiming the Gospel in all its truth and power, in season and out of season, even when that teaching is inconvenient or when the Gospel’s truths run contrary to the directions of the wider society and culture. So, I must point out that our new President has pledged to pursue certain policies that would advance moral evils and threaten human life and dignity, most seriously in the areas of abortion, contraception, marriage, and gender. Of deep concern is the liberty of the Church and the freedom of believers to live according to their consciences.”
From that point at least there has been discussion among a group of our bishops that the matter of Biden’s reception of Communion needs to be addressed. The idea of crafting a statement about “Eucharist coherence” has been supported most significantly by Archbishop Cordileone, Pelosi’s San Francisco ordinary, who has published his own letter recently on the matter as previously mentioned in this column.
Episcopal support for taking up the matter in the upcoming virtual June meeting now also includes Naumann, Strickland, Hying, Aquila, Paprocki, and most, significantly, the USCCB President Archbishop Gomez. He released the Inauguration statement despite discordant notes about the document from Rome as well as from brother bishops.
Catholic News Service reported that 67 bishops signed a statement urging that the proposed discussion on pro-abort politicians and Communion be scrubbed from the June agenda. It added that Gomez responded by pushing back: “In a May 22 memo to fellow bishops, Archbishop José H. Gomez of Los Angeles explained that the USCCB Administrative Committee approved a request from Bishop Kevin C. Rhoades of Fort Wayne-South Bend, Indiana, for the discussion on drafting a document to examine the ‘meaning of the Eucharist in the life of the church’.”
Cardinals Cupich and Tobin visited Cardinal Ladaria, who heads the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in Rome, prior to the May tussle. After that visit the CDF issued a letter to all the U.S. bishops attempting to put a damper on the proposal to bring up Eucharistic coherence in June. Cupich and Tobin are known to favor giving Communion to unrepentant public heretics like Biden and Pelosi based on their own previous public statements.
Archbishop Aquila had an interesting reaction to the furor aroused in the wake of the Ladaria letter, according to Catholic News Service: “Without citing who, Archbishop Aquila said ‘there have been some who have misrepresented’ what Cardinal Ladaria’s letter said, ‘but it was clear from it that the USCCB’s plan to discuss and debate this important issue is warranted and encouraged’.”
Archbishop Cordileone has sparked a discussion with Pelosi. She responded that she believes it’s up to her to decide whether to go to Communion or not. We can be certain that as long as there is a Catholic swing vote to be had she indeed will march up to the rail at Communion time whenever she’s at Mass.
Cordileone stated he is “deeply grieved” that 67 bishops out of 275 want to scrap a confrontation with evil. But he and plenty of other bishops, many of whom will not reveal themselves outside of USCCB meetings for fear of the wolves, are indeed prepared for the battle. Quantity of support, however, is irrelevant in matters of truth.
These bishops understand that shelving discussion would be a grave neglect of the good of souls in danger of damnation should they, Biden and Pelosi among them, continue on their current path of self-destruction. But the bishops who remain viscerally Catholic know well also that their own salvation is in the balance and at risk should they fail to teach those who are evil as well as those who are good.
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