Biden and the bishops: excommunication or storm in a baptismal font? | thearticle

During their June General Assembly America’s Catholic bishops blundered into the US culture wars. Holy Mother Church in the USA seemed about to threaten President Joe Biden over his position

on abortion. Quarrels broke out. Bishops openly questioned each others’ motives. They finally decided that work should begin on drafting a formal statement which could contain guidance on

moral impediments to receiving holy communion. Such a statement could deny communion to the President, a pious Mass-going Catholic who, unlike Trump, shares the Church’s position on climate

change, immigration and racial justice. This was transparently a disunited Bishops Conference, something that Pope Francis and all former Popes sought to avoid. Archbishop José Gomez of Los

Angeles, president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), failed to find a consensus. Perhaps arguing online didn’t help. The critical vote on tasking “the Committee on

Doctrine to move forward with the drafting of a formal statement on the meaning of the Eucharist in the life of the Church” was 168 to 55 with 6 abstentions. Such USCCB Action Items would

normally pass with fewer than ten against or abstaining. Rather less momentous than Martin Luther posting his 95 theses on the church door in Wittenberg, you might say. And you’d be right.

Though you’d be missing an important point. Cardinal Luis Ladaria, a Jesuit colleague of the Pope and Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, had written in May urging the

USCCB to avoid a vote. Pope and Vatican feared the debate would become “a source of discord rather than unity within the episcopate and the larger Church in the United States”. Ladaria

reminded the Conference of the “prerogatives of the Vatican” and the rights of individual bishops suggesting they discuss their approach with the bishops of other countries and seek a “true

consensus”. This, in Vaticanese, was explicit guidance meaning “don’t go there”. That guidance was ignored. Indirectly but surely they were defying the Pope. The clash between America’s

bishops and the Pope had been some time coming and is significant for American politics as well as the Church. Catholics make up 22 per cent of the US electorate. Strong and opposing views

on abortion and gay rights are held by Christian communities and by the influential secular women’s movement throughout the USA. While campaigning, Trump made much of Biden’s support for a

woman’s right to choose. Over his long career in politics Joe Biden’s position on abortion has changed. In the last fifteen years he has moved from traditional Catholic opposition to

abortion to a more supportive, if nuanced, position, distinguishing his personal views on abortion from a representative political role where he felt he had “no right” to overrule the

choices made by the majority of American women. He opposes the 1976 Hyde Amendment which bans federal funding of medical programmes that include abortion provision and is committed to

defending as constitutional Roe v Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court enabling judgement, a hot issue now that the court has a conservative majority. In 2016, Catholics voters, traditionally

Democrat-leaning, voted 52 per cent for Trump and 44 per cent for Hillary Clinton. But in 2020, with a Catholic Democratic candidate, the Catholic vote was evenly distributed between

Republicans and Democrats, though it was racially split, with 67 per cent of Hispanics voting for Biden compared to 42 per cent of White Catholics. According to the Pew Foundation, a 2019

survey showed 77 per cent of Democrat or Democrat-leaning Catholics thought that abortion should be legal in most or all cases, while 63 per cent of Republican Catholics believed the

opposite. In a tight race every vote counts. Archbishop Gomez, the President of the USCCB, informed the Bishops conference at their November 2020 meeting that he was setting up of a working

group on relations with President-elect Biden, singling out abortion as creating a “difficult and complex situation”. The group operated in the shadows — nothing unusual ecclesiastically

there. But, though disbanded after two sessions in February 2021, the Biden working group was behind the Conference’s contentious and admonitory response to Biden’s inauguration. Gomez

pointed out “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”. Five whole paragraphs presented abortion as the bishops’ “pre-eminent priority” – which, incidentally, didn’t mean the only priority. This was all in

sharp contrast to the Pope’s warm congratulations to the new President. An even more important and politically significant outcome of the group’s work was their recommendation that the

bishops should make a formal statement on the general issue of “worthiness for communion”. “General issue” avoided any explicit reference to Catholic politicians’ conduct. Whether their

policies or voting record put them in a position of grave sin and made them ineligible to receive communion would be a “particular issue”. But the claim put about by several bishops that

such a formal document had nothing to do with Church relations with Biden was, to say the least, disingenuous. The Vatican’s position on participation of Catholics in political life,

expressed in a 2002 note from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, emphasises that abortion and euthanasia are not the only “grave matters of Catholic moral and social teaching

that demand the fullest level of accountability”. Again Climate change, immigration and social justice, as well as capital punishment, come to mind. The Bishops of England and Wales have

followed the same principle, for example before the May 2015 general election, advising that Catholics’ voting choice “should seldom, if ever, be based on a single issue”. In the USA the

abortion issue is tangled up with both the constitutional relationship between individual states and the federal government, and funding for health care, limited by the Hyde Amendment. Under

Trump, Republican-governed States increasingly attempted to restrict the application of the key enabling Supreme Court judgement of 1973, Roe v Wade. Several states sought to limit abortion

to rape, incest and danger to mother’s health, provoking powerful opposition from the women’s movement. The indirect impact of the Hyde amendment was to discriminate against pregnant women

who were poor and relying on federal provisions in MEDICAID, while richer, privately insured women could afford safe abortions. Hillary Clinton was the first to call for its repeal in her

2016 election campaign. Joe Biden is America’s second Catholic President, but he is the first to be open about the influence of Catholicism on his spiritual, moral and political life. What

an astonishing outcome it would be if President Biden, who calls slavery America’s “Original Sin” and dares to use Catholic language, should be at risk of condemnation (and even

excommunication) by his own bishops. The Vatican, though, has a millennium’s worth of experience in dealing with troublesome bishops and already seems to be bringing the situation under

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