Bishop stops prime rite for lawmakers

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From combined dispatches

A Catholic bishop in Wisconsin has ordered his priests to stop serving Holy Communion to lawmakers who support abortion or euthanasia.

La Crosse Bishop Raymond L. Burke's four-paragraph "notification" was published in the weekly diocesan newspaper Thursday and was posted on the diocesan Web site, along with a 10-page pastoral letter titled "On the Dignity of Human Life and Civic Responsibility," the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported yesterday.

Citing Vatican doctrine, canon law and teachings by the U.S. bishops, Bishop Burke, who takes over as archbishop of St. Louis later this month, says in the notice that it is his duty "to explain, persuade, correct and admonish those in leadership positions who contradict the gospel of life through their action and policies."

The Rev. Richard Gilles, a canon lawyer and Bishop Burke's chief of staff, said: "That is a direct statement to the priests. They have an obligation to not give them [politicians] Holy Communion. But I think any pastor who has any sensitivity or common sense would sit down in private with these people ... and talk to them and ask them not to come to Holy Communion."

Holy Communion is a central tenet of Catholic faith, which holds that bread and wine are changed in substance to the body and blood of Jesus Christ during the Mass.

The Catholic mayor of La Crosse, John Medinger, told the La Crosse Tribune the bishop was on thin ice and suggested the next step would be to tell Catholics whom to vote for under threat of excommunication.

The Rev. Richard McBrien, a University of Notre Dame professor and author of several books on the church, said a decision by U.S. Catholic bishops in a November meeting to in effect table a proposal to set national policy on the issue showed the level of support for such policies.

The bishops did set up a task force to look at the matter, but Father McBrien said that Cardinal Francis George of Chicago, not considered a liberal, had told the bishops that they also must have concern for church unity.

He said Bishop Burke's action was not unprecedented, pointing to the threatened excommunication of members of a progressive Catholic organization by the bishop of Lincoln, Neb. The threat was never carried out.