Political state of grace

The debate over denial of Communion to pro-choice Roman Catholic politicians was rekindled last month when Bishop Joseph F. Naumann of Kansas City, Kan., told Gov. Kathleen Sebelius to refrain from partaking in the sacrament.

Similar actions by Catholic bishops in the past have led to strong debate among canon lawyers - those who function within the church’s internal legal system.

As Bishop Naumann joins the chorus of American bishops refusing Communion to wayward politicians, a new consensus is emerging among canon lawyers on the topic, which reached a boiling point four years ago surrounding Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry. Mrs. Sebelius, a Democrat, has been the subject of much speculation as a potential vice-presidential pick for Sen. Barack Obama.

“Eight or 10 years ago, when people first started advocating on this, they were voices crying in the wilderness,” says the Rev. Francis G. Morrisey, a retired professor of canon law at St. Paul University and one of the most respected canon lawyers in North America. “What we’re seeing is a consensus emerge; it’s more of a discussion now than a debate.”

Father Morrisey, who long had been among the most vocal opponents of denying Communion to politicians, admits that his thinking on the subject has shifted substantially, although he still does not think Communion should be denied in every case.

“It is very rare that truth is in the extremes,” he says. “We have to look at the individual conscience of each politician, and just when a person has overstepped the line.”

The church law in question is Canon 915, which states that those “who obstinately persist in manifest grave sin, are not to be admitted to Holy Communion,” but mostly it had been applied in cases of remarried or cohabiting Catholics

This was not understood as applying to pro-choice politicians - partly because the Catholic Church is a famously slow-acting institution and abortion’s current shape as a U.S. political issue dates back only to 1973, when the procedure was declared a constitutional right in Roe v. Wade.

Though it has long been an excommunicable offense to obtain or assist in an abortion, there was debate within the church about the appropriate response to the political issue.

For example, New York Gov. Mario Cuomo outlined in 1984 at the University of Notre Dame a pro-choice political stance that said it accepted the wrongness of abortion. The church’s bishops have spent the last two decades teaching against such a “personally opposed, but …” stance, though usually to little effect.

In 2004, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, told American bishops that pro-choice Catholic politicians should first be privately admonished to cease their activism on the abortion issue. If there was no change, the future pope said, the sacrament should be refused.

Father Morrissey said one important determining factor is the attitude of the Catholic politician when approached privately by the bishop, as Mrs. Sebelius was.

“Is the politician ready to look at things and re-evaluate certain situations, or has the politician simply closed the door and said ‘mind your own business?’” he said.

According to some of North America’s leading canon lawyers, what has changed in the past several years is lay activism on the issue, the intellectual “discovery” of Canon 915 by one of the leading U.S. Catholic bishops, and finally the perception that Catholic politicians had lost respect for the bishops and were simply flaunting them.

For example, at least five pro-choice Catholic politicians took Communion during Benedict’s April U.S. visit: Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Sen. Christopher J. Dodd, Sen. John Kerry and former New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani. When asked whether he was uncomfortable violating church rules, Mr. Giuliani, who also is divorced and remarried, gave reporters a one-word answer: “no.”

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