The Catholic Bishops’ Brawl Over Denying Joe Biden Communion

The workings of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops have once again become headline news, as the members, after airing sharp differences among themselves in an online meeting, approved a plan, released last Friday, to draft a “teaching document” about the role of the Eucharist and about their dealings with Catholic politicians who support abortion rights—in particular, President Joe Biden.

The plan raised the dramatic prospect that the nation’s second Catholic President, a faithful Sunday churchgoer, would not be allowed to go to the front of the altar and receive the Eucharist—the act at the center of the Mass, which represents the believer’s communion with Christ and the Church. The plan was interpreted by the press and by the bishops themselves as a sign of deep divisions in American Catholicism; it thrust the conference “into the very heart of the toxic partisan strife” of electoral politics, as Cardinal Joseph Tobin of Newark put it. And it left many Catholics bewildered: How can it be that the Church here is putting President Biden in the dock, while last month Catholic officials in London abruptly cleared Westminster Cathedral for the wedding of two baptized Catholics, the twice-divorced Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his live-in paramour, who bore their child last year?

The U.S. bishops’ immediate motive is clear: they want to send a message that to be a Catholic is to oppose legal abortion. The battle, though, is about much more. It is a sign of the traditionalists’ profound anxiety about the stature of the Church and its leaders in public life—an anxiety akin to that of white working-class Trumpists about their stature in a changing American society. But it is also, strangely, a sign of openness: it suggests that under Pope Francis the Church hierarchy is finally coming clean as a group of men with differing points of view, shaped by alliances and compromises, and led by a pope who has forsworn the papal prerogative to shut down conflict by authoritarian means.

The last time the bishops’ conference got this much attention was in February, 2004, when the prelates released a report on priestly sexual abuse—two years after allegations of widespread abuse and an official coverup in the archdiocese of Boston had become a matter of national scandal. Bishop Wilton D. Gregory, of Belleville, Illinois, who was the president of the conference, presented the report in terms that suggested that the scandal had passed. “I assure you that known offenders are not in ministry,” he said. “The terrible history recorded here is history.” The Times printed his remarks on the front page.

The same year, Senator John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts and a Catholic, was his party’s presumptive candidate for the White House, against President George W. Bush. As with Biden today, traditionalists, led by Raymond Burke, the archbishop of St. Louis, raised the prospect of denying Kerry the Eucharist because he supported the legal right to an abortion. That June, the bishops took up a proposal to restrict politicians’ access to Communion on that basis. After some temperate internal debate—and a letter from Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI) to Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, the archbishop of Washington, D.C., on the topic—the conference decided to leave matters in the hands of local bishops, rather than address it as a group. But, in the process, public attention was shifted away from the bishops’ handling of sexual abuse and toward their supervision of Mass and the sacraments.

The pattern is now repeating itself, with crucial differences. Again the bishops have been disgraced by allegations of clerical sexual abuse: this time, multiple acts of abuse of minors committed beginning in the nineteen-seventies by McCarrick himself, and detailed in a Vatican-commissioned report, the release of which last November led his eventual successor—Wilton Gregory, now a cardinal—to speak of “dark corners of our church of which I am deeply ashamed and profoundly angry—again.” (McCarrick, who was defrocked in 2019, has denied the allegations.) In what can be seen as another attempt to reclaim lost authority, traditionalists are once more asserting that support for abortion rights makes politicians “unworthy” to receive the Eucharist. But, this time, the politician who is the focus of that effort is the President, not a candidate. This time, the Pope is not Benedict but Francis, a moderate whose reluctance to join in the culture wars leaves traditionalists vexed. And, this time, the traditionalists are prevailing.

Their campaign began with the formation of a working group shortly after Biden defeated Donald Trump, whom traditionalist Catholic leaders had openly courted as a come-lately opponent of abortion and an appointer of conservative judges. It hardened on Inauguration Day, when the current president of the bishops’ conference, Archbishop José H. Gomez, of Los Angeles, put out a statement denouncing the new President’s plans to further the “moral evils” of abortion rights and gay rights—whereas Pope Francis sent Biden a telegram of congratulations. Gomez’s statement sparked an unprecedented open disagreement in the hierarchy this spring, as bishops took to stating their own positions, in the press and on social media. Bishop Robert McElroy, of San Diego, writing in the Jesuit magazine America, “warned against letting the sacrament be ‘weaponized,’ ” citing Pope Francis’s 2013 statement that the Eucharist is “not a prize for the perfect but a powerful medicine and nourishment for the weak.” Meanwhile, Charles Chaput, the archbishop emeritus of Philadelphia, resorting to the “rights talk” that conservatives used to despise, wrote in the conservative journal First Things that, when the likes of Joe Biden receive Communion, “they not only put their own souls in grave jeopardy but—just as grievously—they also violate the rights of Catholics who do seek to live their faith authentically.”

Cardinal Gregory—who now, as the archbishop of Washington, is the President’s local bishop—has made clear that he will not bar Biden from the sacrament, so the argument is somewhat academic. (Biden, at a press conference last Friday, said of the proposal, “I don’t think that’s going to happen.”) But it’s an argument that the traditionalists are determined to continue. In May, Cardinal Luis Ladaria, the prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican’s doctrinal office, sent a letter to the head of the conference recommending that the bishops undertake “extensive and serene dialogue” among themselves and with Catholic politicians, rather than putting the matter to a vote at the June meeting. They put it to a vote anyway, and, after a couple of hours of testy virtual debate, approved the planned document, 168–55, with six abstentions. Traditionalists accused moderates of trying to “filibuster,” with a call to wait for an in-person discussion at their next meeting, in November. Moderates warned traditionalists of mission creep and overreach. Prelates on each side accused those on the other of playing politics with the stuff of faith.