Denying Communion to Politicians
Beeck, Frans Jozef van
DENYING COMMUNION TO POLITICIANS A theologian explains why it's wrong Frans Jozef van Beeck S o Archbishop Raymond Burke of Saint Louis has thrown down the gauntlet, instructing his clergy...
...In February 1942, in the Netherlands, I watched a daily communicant being refused the sacrament in a scuffle at the Communion rail...
...rather, it is a fully human—that is, moral— issue...
...Commonweal 20 June 4, 2004 But late in the next pontificate, Pius XII recognized the morality of some forms of planned parenthood...
...Unfortunately, what fell between the cracks was the question: How immoral...
...Neither is cowardice nor dodging proof of malice, and hence, not mortally sinful...
...Our public culture now accepts, and indeed encourages, sexual experience without marital commitment or openness to new life...
...There is economy that is cold, cold that is the heart's great gladness...
...One result of the Dutch bishops' letter was retribution...
...Second, while opinions per se guarantee neither truth nor sound judgment, a climate where differing opinions are expressed freely is intellectually stimulating...
...Was he still following the undivided tradition, where the sexual sins of married couples were never discussed...
...A few preliminaries...
...r, Trit1 NEWS Ii SCHWADRON Commonweal 19 June 4, 2004 Credo as...
...Remember, God never pushes, He only pulls...
...My argument with Archbishop Burke's action is based on two theological sources: the Catholic tradition since at least the Middle Ages, and more recently, the practice of the Catholic faith in the United States...
...This misrepresentation of Catholic tradition was what lay behind my bristling sophomore's reaction...
...Emerging from the sacristy after the Gospel, he emphatically read a pastoral letter from the Dutch bishops: any Catholic directly or indirectly engaged in identifying Jewish citizens to the occupying German authorities was excommunicated...
...Instead of teaching that Christian marriage is a lifelong school of love where no students are ever fully formed, and underscoring the need for the married to grow in the mature love detailed in Humanae vitae, the bishops left the married (so to speak) to their own devices...
...it invites tough questioning...
...Ever since then, the media has mocked the church for what it reports as (and makes merry over) widespread lay and clerical insubordination to papal and episcopal control...
...Three months before, St...
...Listen: wing and toil, breath...
...Being a Catholic theologian involves both responsibilities and privileges...
...The "senior prelates" who vilified Cardinal Joseph Bernardin's Common Ground Initiative were way out of touch with the tradition...
...Unable to have it any other way, the media have kept insisting that his governing concern is the immorality of contraception...
...I went every time...
...Ignatius told him that we do not publicly discuss the sins of individuals...
...I Commonweal 2 I June 4, 2004...
...Paul VI decided to clarify this precise issue, which he reserved to himself...
...Savage as abortion on demand is, it has an upside: some fifteen years after Roe v. Wade I found myself telling students that knowing they were wanted at birth was a grace...
...events are weakening the unity of the Catholic Church in the United States...
...In his previous jurisdiction he had done the same, except he included euthanasia in his published bill of particulars...
...But Aquinas, I found, never treats sinful sexual acts within marriage...
...Intimating that their sin is mortal is not a priestly ministry...
...Ignatius Loyola is said to have called a Jesuit on the carpet for criticizing the current pope's sins from the pulpit...
...4, In moonlight even the stopped bell rings...
...Long before Humanae vitae, our public culture was moving toward an acceptance of the enjoyment of the sexual experience per se...
...public identification of sinners is not a priestly ministry...
...In 1938, she had fled Germany for the Netherlands in the dead of night...
...Importantly, though, the encyclical stopped short of teaching that every act of marital intimacy blemished by contraception is mortally sinful...
...Only at the end will I offer conclusions...
...I have personally enjoyed the freedom to express opinA,NT1-1- RRaR, ,~'~fTl RNr1 D ~ Icr, , 4ci v CORPoPrE Co?l-Vf7thw,, SHORT, y0UPL ;TI EVERU"H I J6-~~, NP J,4+E...
...DENYING COMMUNION TO POLITICIANS A theologian explains why it's wrong Frans Jozef van Beeck S o Archbishop Raymond Burke of Saint Louis has thrown down the gauntlet, instructing his clergy to refuse prochoice Catholic politicians Communion...
...As the late Cardinal Basil Hume noted, the blind distribution of contraceptives to high school students is "a counsel of despair...
...Mass, our feisty pastor had surprised us...
...Far from refusing dialogue, he pursued it...
...Under these circumstances, I will argue, it is imprudent for bishops to push the envelope by threatening Catholic politicians who vote prochoice with refusal of Holy Communion, since the grounds on which the threat is based arguably do not hold up under scrutiny, even if the bishops were enjoying proper authority...
...Jews associated with Protestants were mostly left alone...
...Nor am I a political agent...
...In this regard, contraception differs in kind from our choices of, say, furniture or toothpaste...
...The only life that seems to count (and it hurts to write this) is the "private" lives of individuals who live as they please...
...Still, Catholic Christianity holds that no evil in our world is definitive, whether it be the "contraceptive mentality" described so tellingly by John Paul II, abortion on demand, the legalization of "mercy killing," " genocidal acts, or even preparation for nuclear warfare...
...Third, for Catholics, human life is not the ultimate norm...
...Furthermore, the widespread promotion of contraceptives as a "solution" strikes me as malign...
...Several bishops' conferences saw this almost immediately, and welcoming the teaching of Humanae vitae, they referred the married to their consciences—a common Catholic way of suggesting that there is room for venial sin in the practice of sexual intimacy in marriage...
...Other bishops have followed suit...
...This, and his assembling a promising advisory committee, had most Catholics hoping for a simple yes-or-no ruling on contraception...
...But unlike my childhood experience of public episcopal censure, which I found just, his measure I found disproportionate...
...I was a sixth grader, an altar boy awed by liturgy, and determined to be a priest...
...On top of this came the recent clerical sexual-abuse scandal: under the "leadership" of a handful of pastorally and theologically inept figures— some criminally complicit with a minority of pathological priests—the bishops once again fell short of their pastoral responsibility to the married, their children, and their own priests...
...In due course, I discovered how widely held was the assumption that nearly all people, married and unmarried, were living in mortal sin, since all genital gratification both inside and outside marriage constituted such sin...
...I rarely indicate my views on current issues...
...It took me a moment to notice his resistance...
...The latter do not include the right to publicly oppose a bishop's authority or his motives...
...Nine months later, I found my violin teacher's apartment sealed—his wife was Catholic...
...All measure is a great swing suspended by the finest thread of air...
...He repeated his performance at four more Masses...
...Following Humanae vitae, the bishops treated contraception as a doctrinal, rather than a pastoral theological, matter—a bad mistake, in my judgment, which would haunt them...
...As a priest-theologian, I do not worship the church...
...Yet the Catholics who visibly bore the brunt of the church's public, canonical rejection of contraception were mainly celibates—priests—who were depicted as "dissenters," Charles Curran being only the most visible...
...In such a world, it is indeed difficult to be a Catholic...
...Here we must also recall the history of the contraception issue...
...Blaming is as old as the Garden of Eden, and the Christian tradition rejects it...
...In this situation, where do I stand...
...Poor, mugwumpian Catholic politicians...
...How so...
...By contrast to the northern Low Countries' stern tolerance, American-style tolerance positively welcomes a variety of opinions...
...As I have indicated, Humanae vitae implied, without saying so directly, that contraception was not necessarily mortally sinful...
...Ever since Humanae vitae, I have been listening to younger and older Catholic couples...
...Blaming them is to forget that Augustine called the Donatists brothers, and encouraged his congregation to do the same...
...Among North American Catholics, especially in communities influenced by seventeenth-century Jansenism and Puritanism, sexual activity came to be viewed as morally delinquent, except, conceivably, in the context of marriage...
...Certainly, the ready resort to abortion in this country is a moral horror and a tragic lapse, protected by the American system of government...
...This loss has been decisively worsened by the recent clergy sexual-abuse scandal...
...Still, I suspect that some may be trying to recoup their authority...
...most are opposed to it "personally"—a bad choice of words...
...This piece is the result...
...Good ideas are a dime a dozen," as Bernard Lonergan, SJ, used to note caustically—so I dislike theologians' "opinions...
...Later I heard he had done so to prevent his assistants from being arrested...
...But even there, passages from Augustine were regularly quoted, out of context, to prove that there really was no such thing as intercourse without at least venial sin...
...The answer, deeply frustrating at the time, was Humanae vitae, which called contraception immoral...
...Accepting evil is not the same thing as approving of it—let alone promoting it...
...It was prevalent enough for Vatican II to insist on the high human (that is, moral) value of faithful sexual intimacy and love—the central philosophical and theological theme in John Paul II's discourses and writings on marriage as well...
...So, I am grateful for living, learning, and teaching in this republic, which, constitutionally, neither opposes religion nor supports particular religious establishments...
...One can't blame the bishops for thinking that they should at least be drawing the line somewhere...
...Aquinas had taught it, we were told...
...ow let us pass to my second source: the Catholic experience in the United States...
...Anne Corny ion in the United States...
...But I recall a classroom incident in 1969...
...A sophomore told me it was Catholic teaching that we must go to confession before receiving Communion...
...As soon as I heard about Archbishop Burke's edict, I thought of those events...
...They are just sinners of a visible kind—implausible candidates for canonical penalties...
...Fairly recently this led me to study the encyclical again...
...God knows how many couples conscientiously struggled with church teaching, and how many felt they were abandoned by the bishops...
...and three years ago, in my hearing, a youngish religious volunteered that a physician had "cautioned" his mother while she was pregnant...
...Even logically, being prochoice is not identical with being proabortion...
...Popular psychology, coupled with modern advertising techniques, favored these developments, which, not surprisingly, often lacked depth...
...Talk about thankfulness for the given gift of life...
...Because the leaves fall softly when they drop, I will follow the vole's track...
...Within weeks, SS troops were rounding up Jews who were Catholic converts or associated with Catholics...
...I know of no Catholic politicians who have purposely sought to positively advance abortion...
...I am not alone in being persuaded that ever since Humanae vitae, Pope Paul VI's 1968 encyclical on birth control, the Catholic bishops of the United States have suffered a critical loss of pastoral and magisterial authority, among both the laity and the clergy, on matters pertaining to marriage and sexuality...
...In Divini illius (1928) and Casti connubii (1930), Pius XI left no doubt that unlimited sexual liberation was abhorrent...
...First, in this piece I will not be stating "my opinion...
...A theory of beauty...
...For Catholic theologians, this must raise a question about the extent to which these Frans Jozef van Beeck, SJ, born in the Netherlands in 1930, is John Cardinal Cody professor emeritus of Loyola University Chicago...
...Rather, I suffer with it, as family members do with family...
...For me, such an episcopal move was not a first...
...If that is the case, I fear they will only be shrugged off further...
...Still, Archbishop Burke's stand, courageous as it may seem, raises so many doubts about the fit between the great tradition and North American Catholicity that I have resolved to do some theology in public: I argue that withholding sacraments from Catholic politicians is too severe a penalty...
...At least one Orthodox theologian told me: "Our moral theology stops at the sanctuary of the marriage bed...
...Naturally, I had found this climate elsewhere, if not at the same pitch...
...Humanae vitae taught that contraception is an intrinsically immoral act...
...Because my blood is the shape of sky, I will look to not man nor woman...
...two weeks later, he was killed in Auschwitz...
...True, but let me add something...
...A rchbishop Burke writes: "the port of entry for the culture of death in our society has been the abandonment of the respect for the procreative meaning of the conjugal act...
...This is all the more likely when someone like Archbishop Burke appears to overlook the canonical practice of restrictive application of laws imposing penalties and limiting freedoms, and the moral practice of distinguishing between formal and merely material cooperation...
...Yet from Jesus' execution—theologically speaking, the worst injustice ever—our endlessly resourceful, merciful God has drawn the greatest good...
...I will admit, though, that I occasionally wonder about the current taste for ideology, where opinion can take on the air of absolute truth...
...Let me begin with three nontheological remarks...
...For me, it turned out to be one of those teachable moments: God's people are not to be pushed about...
...Second, it fails in mercy toward a wounded world steeped in sin—but not degenerate down to its root...
...n 1957, a tall, athletic, slightly mischievous Dutch Jesuit priest who is now eighty-nine, inquired of a then twenty-seven-year-old scholastic, too intense for his own and his students' good: "Can I tell you something...
...They did not sound like God's Word...
...The Sunday before, at the 7 a.m...
...Benedicta of the Cross, a Carmelite nun better known as Edith Stein, had been murdered there...
...First, it draws perilously close to selective condemnation...
...the former may involve questioning his pastoral theological wisdom in making particular decisions...
...Then the older man smiled and said, "Don't be so pushy with the kids...
...When I told him that this was imprecise, he bristled...
...hence, it cannot be commended as "a positively good and human thing to do...
...4, Assonance delivers soul, consonance is quickened echo...
...What, then, is the issue...
...I needed to figure out why...
...In light of the Catholic tradition, Paul VI's major point was that contraception is not a matter of convenience...
...The young man replied hesitantly, "Yes...
Vol. 131 • June 2004 • No. 11
