RBWords - Volume 22 - Number 3: March 2009
Something to Think About
- Although the political campaigning of the past Fall is over, thank the Lord, there is a familiar controversy still being played out in regard to denying reception of the Eucharist to certain Catholic politicians because of their position on the subject of abortion. This is a very serious question and cannot be simply disposed of by threats and canonical actions. It is clear that our own bishops are not of one mind on the pastoral action to be taken. Excommunication is the strongest penalty in canon law! The church can no longer turn citizens over to the government for punishment as was once done in the inquisition – again, thank the Lord! But to listen to some advocates of the use of the supreme penalty in this matter, one could get the impression that they wouldn’t seriously mind it.
There are a number of “battlegrounds” in this conflict. One of the most recent concerns the interpretation of a particular set of articles in the Code of Canon Law - ##915 and 916. The first charges sacramental ministers with denying communion to persons “who obstinately persist in manifest grave sin.” The second charges the individual conscience: to wit: “A person who is conscious of grave sin is not to celebrate Mass or to receive the Body of the Lord without prior sacramental confession unless a grave reason is present and there is no opportunity of confession.” The use of these canons to “politicize” the Eucharist has already been the subject of cautions by many American bishops. As an ordinary confessor, I am very aware that Canon 916 is not particularly well known to Catholics, although there is a kind of awareness in regard to certain notorious sexual matters. The burden laid on ministers by Canon 915 can be terrible – the denial of the Eucharist (in the absence of a decree of excommunication to back up the action) requires a public pastoral judgment. Suppose a local pastor or Lay Ecclesial Extraordinary Minister of the Eucharist should decide on his or her own judgment to deny communion to someone whose conduct the Minister considers “manifest and grave?”
Those who too easily reach for these canonical articles as weapons should realize that they were not designed just for use in the abortion controversy! They could easily be used in other areas of church teaching with which some of these same advocates have considerable disagreement. The law can be a double-edged sword and it can cut just as finely for the ordinary pew-person as it does for Catholic politicians whose public moral positions belie their baptismal commitment. IT’S SOMETHING TO THINK ABOUT.
It Has Been Said
“The pure of heart, liberated from narcissism, surely see the pain and the horror of this world even more clearly than most of us. They see the pain of the wounds we inflict on each other more clearly than we do. They see how terrible is child abuse, more than the rest of us. But they also see God’s presence in everyone, even in the abuser. If we learn purity of heart, then we shall glimpse buried beneath other people’s failures and sins the seeds of a desire for God, the botched attempts to love, the hunger for holiness, muddied and misdirected and poisoned, but still there.”
From WHY GO TO CHURCH – THE DRAMA OF THE EUCHARIST by Timothy Radcliffe, O.P.