Last week, Archbishop John J. Myers of Newark asked pro-choice Catholic lawmakers to voluntarily abstain from receiving the eucharist. And New Jersey Gov. James E. McGreevey announced that he would no longer take communion at mass as a result.
But as it turns out, none of this is new. McGreevey had already been abstaining from communion, at least in Newark’s Basilica of the Sacred Heart, where he attends mass on special occasions. “The governor has known the archbishop’s position on abortion,” says Jim Goodness, a spokesman for Myers, “and in the three years he’s been governor, whenever he’s been to the basilica he’s not taken communion.”
The fact that this is now newsworthy makes all the more obvious that all the sudden interest in the Catholic credentials of pro-choice Democratic lawmakers is political, in the middle of a presidential election campaign. (Is JFK looking on and laughing at the idea that the knock on presumptive Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry is … that he’s not Catholic enough? Maybe not.)
Yet Rome, contrary to popular belief, is not an outpost of the Republican Party. The bureaucrats of St. Peter’s square are actually a lot like their fellow citizens in Italy–pacifistic, in the main, and wildly pro-Palestinian. (Wondering where on earth you might find a pen embossed with words of wisdom by that great humanitarian, Yasir Arafat? The Vatican gift shop, of course.)
Take abortion out of the equation and the pope himself would probably be considered too liberal for election to higher office in this country. I can see the attack ads now: “John Paul–wrong on defense. Wrong on taxes. Way out of the mainstream.''
Then again, the church will never–can never–take abortion out of the equation. And it is ridiculous to expect people who sincerely believe that abortion is the taking of a life to say, “Just do the best you can.’ For while church officials can differ in tone, in rhetoric, in degrees of compassion for those who find themselves in a really awful place, there is nowhere, nowhere else for them to go on this issue.
The church does regularly get used by both American political parties, with Democrats selectively focusing on the pope’s opposition to the war and capital punishment. But McGreevey is not in this case “caving” in to his political opponents; he is deferring to his church on a tenet of faith that, for believers, has nothing to do with who wins in November.
This distinction often gets lost in news coverage, unfortunately. An April 23 Associated Press story out of Rome described presumptive Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry as at odds with his church over “his unapologetic support of human rights, including a woman’s right to abortion.” A May 6 story in The New York Times said McGreevey would henceforth be abstaining “because his support for abortion rights and other social causes contradicts church doctrine.”
For the faithful, however, abortion is neither a human-rights issue nor a social cause. They think of themselves as protecting the truly defenseless, as squarely for human rights and social causes. And we in the media are wrong to assume that their real agenda is either anti-woman or pro-Bush.
What the pertinent document released at the Vatican last month actually said is, “The church’s custom shows it is necessary for each person to examine himself at depth, and that anyone who is conscious of grave sin should not celebrate or receive the Body of the Lord without prior sacramental confession.”
That was a follow-up to a papal encyclical issued by John Paul II a year ago, which said, “The judgment of one’s state of grace obviously belongs only to the person involved, since it is a question of examining one’s conscience. However … those who obstinately persist in manifest grave sin are not to be admitted to eucharistic communion.” In other words, Jim McGreevey may, by his own lights, be was right to abstain.
Just as leaders like Cardinal Theodore McCarrick of Washington are right to be very hesitant to use the eucharist as a weapon. The church is supposed to teach us, not police us. Who would want to belong to a church that kept a list of those deemed unfit to receive communion on hand at the altar, like the list of people who’ve bounced checks taped up by the cash register at your corner convenience store?
Presumably, McGreevey examined his own conscience and made his own decision on the matter: “The archbishop said he felt the governor was honest and he respects his decision,” said Goodness, Myer’s spokesman. “You look at it and if you don’t agree, you step back.”
Now those of us who care about these questions for other than political reasons can get back to worrying about our own failings. In my Catholic elementary school, where we attended daily mass, the sisters used to tell us that after receiving the Body of Christ, we ought to be too busy praying to watch all our friends filing back from the communion rail. Which might not have been such bad advice.
