Personally Opposed, But…

Probably the biggest news story on the intersection of politics and religion thus far in 2021 has been the decision of the Catholic bishops to vote to draft a document that would set a national policy that would bar pro-abortion Catholic politicians, like Joe Biden, from receiving the Eucharist. They haven’t voted to do this yet, they just voted to have a vote. While I am praying that they do, I also doubt they will. For decades, an uneasy compromise has existed between the Catholic Church and pro-abortion Catholic politicians – as long as Catholic politicians would say that they were personally opposed to abortion, but did not want to legally enforce it, the bishops would continue to allow them to receive the Eucharist.

Were there exceptions of Catholic bishops who barred a Catholic politician that supported abortion from taking the Eucharist? Sure, but they were almost always placed in very conservative areas where a pro-abortion politician, Catholic or otherwise, would have a very hard time gaining the nomination. Bishop Joseph Strickland from the Diocese of Tyler in Texas comes to mind here. Now, Biden has never officially rescinded his earlier statements that he was “personally opposed to abortion, but” so this raises the question as to why, after so many decades of allowing this to slide, have the bishops (maybe) put their foot down?

Before I begin that discussion, let me say I am in complete agreement with denying Biden, and any other pro-choice Catholic politician, Communion. I Corinthians 11: 27-28 makes it clear that receiving Communion in an unworthy manner is, in and of itself, a sin. Reflecting this, Canon 915 of Ecclesiastical Law also gives priests the right and the duty to deny those in a state of public sin Communion. The “public” part of this is important because 1) obviously, if someone sins privately the priest has no way of knowing about it, and 2) the scandal it creates. If a man who is a private adulterer takes Communion without repentance, then he is committing the sin of sacrilege on top of his adultery. But, if he is publicly bragging about his adultery and still is allowed to take Communion, then he (and the priest) are also causing scandal and sending a message that adultery is not really a sin, which can cause others to fall into sin.

Back on topic, why is it that the bishops (again maybe) are putting their foot down now? In order to understand that, we must look at the history of the “personally opposed, but…” line (POB). Back in 1964, the Democratic Party was certainly a lot closer to being the party of my grandfather than it is today, at least in certain states, but leftists were still working to change the party of the Solid South into a vehicle for leftist revolution. One such issue the Left was working on was abortion. In Old America the thought of legalized abortion was unthinkable to most of Middle America and was accordingly illegal everywhere. Much like the campaign to make contraception legal, pro-abortion activists were working to do the same with abortion. By 1964, as much of Middle America slept, it had become clear to Democratic Party higher-ups that abortion was soon to become a mainstream political issue.       

Although unknown to almost everyone, one of the most unfaithful days in American history occurred on a warm summer day in 1964 when six Roman Catholic priests, Revs. Albert Jonsen, Joseph Fuchs, Robert Drinan, Giles Milhaven, Richard McCormick and Charles Curran and a bishop (who has never been named), Judases all of them, met with the Kennedy family on their compound in Hainesport, Massachusetts to discuss what they would do when the day came that abortion was an open cause for the Left. Their solution was this – oppose legalized abortion as long as you can, but as soon as you cannot, simply state that while you are personally opposed to abortion, you do not want to force that on anyone else. And while the compromise was reached that day, by no means was everyone on board with it.

In the early 1970s, Humberto Sousa Medeiros, the then archbishop of Boston refused to allow the baptism of an infant whose mother had advocated for legalized abortion, though she personally opposed it. The compromise was more or less set in stone twenty years after the infamous Kennedy compound meeting when then New York governor Mario Cuomo gave a speech at Notre Dame, saying that while he was personally opposed to abortion, he did not want to make that opposition a law. Thus, the compromise was more or less set, declare you are a “POB” and we’ll let it slide with only the more conservative bishops, who almost always presided over a diocese where a pro-abortion politician would never get elected anyway.

Over the years though, and especially during the last six, the Democratic Party has become increasingly radicalized on abortion; while the party of the 1980s or 1990s could still find room for a Bob Casey, Sr. or Zell Miller, the party of 2021 could not. Even someone like Hilary Clinton, as recently as 2008, would attempt to moderate her language by saying that abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare.” But, that changed during the Obama presidency as the Left declared open war on Heritage America and its values. Notably, Obama spent years dragging the Little Sisters of the Poor into court, hoping to force them to pay for birth control. Meanwhile, any regulation on abortion, even with widespread levels of support, was now seen as tantamount to fascism, and those Democratic politicians that had expressed personal discomfort with abortion were given an ultimatum – either drop all that or we’ll primary you.

2020 saw the fall of the last Democrat in the House that could still reasonably be described as pro-life, Dan Lipinski, as the entire party apparatus joined to primary him. And, in 2015 #ShoutYourAbortion became a tending topic on Twitter with women proudly proclaiming that they had abortions, moving from abortion as a necessary evil to a positive good. I’ve spent the past twenty years exploring some of the darkest corners of the internet and it was among the ghastliest things I have ever seen. I know that Twitter isn’t real life and trending topics can have an outsized presence, but the fact is that the entirety of the mainstream pro-abortion movement either gave #ShoutYourAbortion its unqualified praise or at most offered tepid pushback that was clearly more concerned with fueling rightwing backlash than any principled opposition to it.

And, what was the reaction from almost all the POBs? Silence. I always thought that “personally opposed, but…” was a cop-out. The POBs were given a perfect opportunity to show that they were serious about that “personally opposed” part and they failed. Compare this to the reaction that mainstream pro-life groups had when then-candidate Donald Trump floated the idea of punishing women who sought abortions. They were jumping over themselves to condemn him and Trump was forced to back down. There was no such move over #ShoutYourAbortion. The lie that “no one really supports abortion” was exposed and the POBs had nothing to say about their allies. They could have said that such language was unacceptable. They could have strongly condemned Obama’s attacks on the Little Sisters of the Poor. They could have demanded the party allow for more leeway on abortion. Instead, they did nothing. They did nothing, they stayed silent giving me and everyone else reason to believe they were never really serious about that “personally opposed” part.

Almost sixty years ago a compromise was made. A poorly thought-out compromise, but a compromise nevertheless. The POBs were given a fantastic opportunity to uphold their end of the bargain and failed to do so.  Far from being political or “weaponizing the Eucharist,” the bishops are going out of their way to avoid either. They could have talked about this last year, and by doing it this year, the fallout for the 2022 midterms will likely be minor. In an odd way, I do have to hand it to Obama and the people behind #ShoutYourAbortion, for as evil as they are/were, they helped expose the POBs more than any of us on the Right could.