US Bishops Refuse Ratzinger’s Advice

Another splendid job by the USCCB in ignoring Rome once again:

During the Denver meeting, the Archbishop of Washington, Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, who heads a committee of bishops set up to look into the issue, read the confidential Ratzinger memorandum to fellow bishops. “It is up to us as bishops in the United States to discern and act on our responsibilities as teachers, pastors and leaders in our nation”, he told them. He said Cardinal Ratzinger “clearly leaves to us as teachers, pastors and leaders whether to pursue this path” of denying the Eucharist to pro-abortion politicians.

But Ratzinger’s memorandum, entitled “Worthiness to Receive Holy Communion: General Principles”, appears to make no mention of this (See Documentation, p36). Instead, he advises American bishops to speak privately with prominent Catholics who defy church teachings on key issues involving the sanctity of life, alert them to the gravity of their offences, and warn them that they should not receive Communion. If these warnings are not heeded, Ratzinger’s memorandum continues, “and the person in question, with obstinate persistence, still presents himself to receive the Holy Eucharist, the minister of Holy Communion must refuse to distribute it”.

Sandro Magister, the veteran vaticanista who obtained the memorandum and published it in the Italian weekly, L’Espresso, described it as “what Ratzinger wanted, but didn’t get”.

The Catholic Bishops just don’t get it. . . however, there are several bright spots, namely Archbishop Burke of the Archdiocese of St. Louis:

Meanwhile Archbishop Burke – who touched off the controversy by declaring that John Kerry could not receive Communion within his archdiocese during the Missouri primary election – has hardened his position since the Denver meeting, writes Richard Major from New York. Burke, who is well known in Rome and is seen as one of the rising stars of the US Church, has written a pastoral letter in which he tells Catholic voters that to support a dissenting politician amounts to “committing a mortal sin”. “Catholics who support such pro- abortion candidates participate in a grave evil,” he says in the pastoral letter. “They must show a change of heart and be sacramentally reconciled or refrain from receiving Holy Communion.”

The differnece between McCarrick’s position and Burke’s is not in reference to the Catholic faithful. There will be no “politicization” of the Eucharist at the communion rail (a rail which in many churches has sadly been dismantled post-1960). The difference is in reference to the pro-abortion leaders these Catholics presumably follow.

Pro-abortion Catholic polticians are leaders, and when they lead in a direction opposite their faith, they do something much more notable than someone sitting in the pews who is having a private struggle on the issue. Rather than a private struggle, pro-abortion Catholic politicians lend credibility to the erroneous position that one can be pro-abortion and Catholic – or even worse, be privately anti-abortion and publically pro-choice.

Such a position as John Kerry’s does something that ordinary lay people’s opinions do not; it creates scandal. That is the primary difference between the laity and Catholic politicians. It is an issue that Burke rightly understands and squashes as a good Bishop should, and one that McCarrick understands from the position of the laity, but without a proper understanding of the grave scandal such politicians create.