In 2019, a voting guide published by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) called fighting abortion their “preeminent priority.” Now the group will decide if the Church should deny communion to politicians who support reproductive rights, including President Joe Biden.
A vote is likely to take place this week during the USCCB’s annual conference.
The Washington Post contextualizes the issue:
The vote comes after two decades of deliberate, passionate focus by Catholic political and theological conservatives to make abortion a litmus test for the sacrament, while church teachings on poverty, climate, racism and authoritarianism, among other things, become more subjective to follow. It also comes after years of hardening toward abortion opponents within the Democratic Party.
Biden has been denied communion before. During the 2020 campaign, a South Carolina priest rebuffed Biden, saying, those “who advocates for abortion places himself or herself outside of Church teaching.”
“There is danger to one’s soul if he or she receives the body and blood of our Lord in an unworthy manner,” said Archbishop Samuel Aquila of Denver, a conservative member of the USCCB
Biden became just the second Roman Catholic president in American history and the first since John F. Kennedy.
According to The New York Times, the Vatican is vehemently opposed to abortion but has urged Catholic leaders in the U.S. to avoid what can look like partisan bickering. Pope Francis has recently said communion “is not the reward of saints, but the bread of sinners,” and a top Vatican official wrote to the USCCB expressing concern that the vote may “become a source of discord rather than unity within the episcopate and the larger church in the United States.”
“The concern in the Vatican is not to use access to the Eucharist as a political weapon,” Fr. Antonio Spadaro, a close ally of Francis, told The New York Times.
The USCCB has a politically conservative orientation. The New York Times reports, “Some clergy close to Francis in the Vatican say privately that elements within the American church have become political and extremist.”
But over 67 American bishops – about a third of the conference – have signed a letter asking for the communion issue to be dropped from this year’s agenda.
A policy that bans abortion supporters from communion would need unanimous support from the group since it’s opposed by the Vatican.
“If this vote proceeds despite warnings from the Vatican and opposition from many American bishops, it will only underscore how conference leadership puts its own political priorities before church unity and the pastoral model of Pope Francis,” John Gehring, Catholic program director at the Washington-based clergy network Faith in Public Life, told USA Today.