If you’re pro-choice you can’t be Catholic?

New York archbishop Cardinal Edward Egan criticized former NYC mayor Rudy Giuliani for taking communion during the Pope’s visit to the city because of Guiliani’s support of legalized abortion. Earlier this year St. Louis Archbishop Raymond Burke vowed to deny Giuliani communion should the Presidential candidate approach him, and has further asserted that, “that anyone administering Communion is morally obligated to deny it to Catholic politicians who support an abortion-rights position contrary to church teaching.”

Other Catholics have criticized Giuliani’s recent partaking of the sacrament on the grounds of his divorces.

This denial of select religious paticipation is artibtrary and difficult to understand. If Giuliani’s not worthy to receive communion, is he worthy to be a member of the church? If he has defied the church laws to such an extent, shouldn’t he be excommunicated?

Then again, if the church excommunicated every pro-choice parishioner, every woman who had an abortion, or every man who condoned a female’s right to choose whether or not to abort, it would end up with a severely diminished congregation.

What about parishioners who vote for a pro-choice candidate becasue he or she offers affordable health care for their children, or becasue the candidate vows to end a senseless war? Still no communion?

And what about the pro-life politicians who, almost without exception, rigorously endorse the death penalty, another “mortal sin”? Or those who advocate torturing suspected enemies?

And why communion? What about the other sacraments? Should Giuliani be denied last rites, too? Or the sacrament of confession? Should he be denied the sacrament that would give him the opportunity to unburden his soul?

Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan was a Catholic, and his vote helped decide Roe v Wade in 1973. Pope Paul VI had nothing to say about him, as far as I could dig up, nor did D.C. Archbishop Patrick Cardinal O’Boyle. Brennan retained his right to take communion, and presumably also last rites since in 1997 his funeral mass was held at St. Mathew’s Cathedral in Washington D.C.

And what about those who have sex before marriage or use contraception? Pope John Paul II deemed both acts “intrinsically evil“, and Pope Benedict XVI has since conceded the teaching to be “unchangeable.”

Those lines could become pretty short at communion time.

Yet Pope Benedict didn’t refuse to serve communion to Giuliani. How could he? Although Giuliani took communion at St. Patricks, during a mass attended primarily by clergy, the following day the Pope held mass for 60,000 at Yankee Stadium. Should everyone have been asked their stance on abortion before the Eucharist was lifted to their mouths?

If believing in the legality of abortion for people of all religions is such a deal-breaker, again - why not excommunicate?

Because to consistently excommunicate based on this criteria would decimate the church. Its prevalence and power would shrink. And that, above all else, cannot be allowed.

So it’s a mortal sin. Just like contraception. So much so that we will block reproductive health measures to fight AIDS in Africa in order to prevent the use of life-saving contraception. However, it’s not so much of an issue that we will risk losing much of our flock over it.

Then again, why should someone be turned away from a religion for sinning? Isn’t that the whole point? If someone, especially someone engaged in what your religion considers to be sinful life choices, wants to be an active member of your church, to listen to your clergy’s sermons, to worship with you, shouldn’t that be a good thing? If you really want to change someone’s mind or behavior, keeping that person in the fold should be the best way to do so. Wasn’t that what Jesus was all about, embracing the sinner?

Or maybe it’s not about casting out the mortal sinners, maybe it’s the public chastising that’s important. The standing on a chair in a dunce hat humiliation - satisfaction for those who are morally superior, those who truly deserve communion to witness others denied it.

After all, how many behaviors can be criteria for removal from the church without disseminating the church itself?

And if you want to talk about human acts that would deign one unworthy of partaking in something holy…well, the Pope himself is hardly exculpable.

Catholics for Free Choice, a self described “independent not-for-profit organization engaged in research, policy analysis, education, and advocacy on issues of gender equality and reproductive health,” conducted a poll during the 2004 US presidential election and found that 53% of Catholics identified themselves as pro-choice and 61% believed abortion should be legal.

The organization’s splinter group, Catholics in Political Life: Challenges to Faith in Democracy uses the church’s own teachings to open the debate about abortion and gender issues:

1. Catholic teaching regards the well-formed conscience, not catechism or statements by bishops, as the final arbiter in moral decision making.

2. Recent teachings of the church acknowledge that it does not know when a fetus becomes a person so it cannot state explicitly that abortion is murder. However, there is no doubt about the personhood of a pregnant woman, and the protections that the hierarchy would grant to fetal life should be extended to include women facing difficult or unsupportable pregnancies. Not only that, but for those who do think that abortion is killing, the church does permit killing in certain instances, some military conflicts being a prime example.

3. The church has not made its teachings on abortion infallible. As recently as 1995, in Evangelium Vitae, Pope John Paul II and his advisers considered and rejected the inclusion of the adjective “infallible” to describe its teaching on abortion.

4. The Catholic system of probabilism supports Catholics’ right to dissent from church teachings if there is a solid probability that the teaching is wrong and that this belief is supported by theologians or that the dissent is informed by prayerful and thoughtful discovery.

Read the rest here.

Go into any mass on any Sunday morning across the US, and you’ll see a group of flawed individuals, most of whom haven’t been cleansed by confession in a long time, step forward and take “the body of Christ.”

If Cardinal Egan really wanted to reduce the number of abortions, even without advocating contraception use or extramarital sex, there are plenty of ways he could have used his tenure as NYC Archbishop to do so. As it is, he will likely retire within the year, having submitted his resignation to the Pope, as required, upon his 75th birthday.

His legacy is marked by improving the archdiocese’s financial standing by closing 15 schools and 21 parishes, having an imperious demeanor, and weathering a nasty 2006 lawsuit alleging sex abuse cover-up and a closeted (sexually active) Egan.

According to Rocco Palmo, an American-based writer for The Tablet, the international Catholic weekly published in London, priests under Egan had serious problems with his leadership:

Long-simmering tensions among a broad cross-section of the archdiocese’s priests broke into the open today with the circulation of an anonymous letter under the authorship of a group calling itself “A Committee of Concerned Clergy for the Archdiocese of New York.” Saying that, “At no time has the relationship between the Ordinary and the priests of the Archdiocese been so fractured and seemingly hopeless as it is now,” the authors have urged their confreres to lodge “a formal vote of ‘NO Confidence‘” (emphases original) in Cardinal Edward M. Egan, who became archbishop in 2000. Using strong language throughout the 950-word missive, the authors allege a widespread finding that Egan’s relationship with his priests has been “defined by dishonesty, deception, disinterest and disregard.”

Running his mouth about which Catholic is worthy of communion does little for his supposed cause and, in my opinion, nothing for to rectify his reputation or improve the good he might leave behind him.

Tags: Archbishop Egan, Catholism, Giuliani Communion, Pope Benedict XVI