THE QUESTION:
Who should receive Christian Communion?
THE RELIGION GUY’S ANSWER:
By coincidence, Christianity’s practice for sharing the Communion bread and wine (or juice) is popping up in two separate controversies.
Item: San Francisco’s Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone sparked an ongoing fuss with his May 19 declaration that Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi is not to receive the sacrament at Masses in her hometown because she vehemently advocates liberal abortion laws while openly identifying as Catholic.
Item: On June 27, Episcopal Church delegates will confer online on whether the agenda at a national convention in Baltimore July 8–11 will take up a radical proposal to offer Communion to people who are not baptized and thus not affiliated with the Christian religion.
Let’s first walk through the Catholic situation. Last year the U.S. bishops debated whether a forthcoming policy statement on the sacrament of Communion would address the fitness of pro-choice Catholic politicians to receive the elements at the altar. The advent of an ardently pro-choice and actively Catholic President, Joseph Biden, energized the discussion.
Kansas Archbishop Joseph Naumann, who chairs the U.S. bishops’ committee on pro-life issues, said it’s “a grave moral evil” to identify as Catholic and advocate open abortion choice “contrary to the church’s teaching.” In the end, however, the bishops’ statement sidestepped the problem.
Cordileone’s related stance toward Pelosi has been joined by the bishops of neighboring Santa Rosa, California; Tyler, Texas; and Arlington, Virginia. But policy on this is set by each local bishop and in Cardinal Wilton Gregory’s Washington, D.C., Pelosi has no problem finding a church to receive the sacrament.
In a similar action, on June 6 Denver Archbishop Samuel Aquila and three other Colorado bishops asked Catholic state legislators who voted for an abortion rights bill to “voluntarily refrain” from taking Communion.
Cordileone explained that he is simply implementing canon law, which prescribes that parishioners “who obstinately persist in manifest grave sin are not to be admitted to Holy Communion” (#915).