A couple of decades ago, I was the Best Man in a large Catholic wedding. I can’t remember all the details, but at one point in the pre-ceremony proceedings, I was asked to attend Mass. It was a fairly conservative Church, and since there were a lot of out-of-towners and guests, it was explained that communion was not for everyone. If you weren’t Catholic or weren’t in good standing, for example you hadn’t gone to confession recently, you were not supposed to participate in communion. This put me in an awkward situation.
I was raised in the Episcopalian Church, which does have communion, so I was familiar with the rite and would have had no trouble acting appropriately. But obviously I wasn’t a Catholic, and in my personal beliefs, I wasn’t even a trinitarian. I was pretty clearly being instructed to stay in my pew.
The groom was a college buddy of mine, but the wedding was in his home town. This was the first time I was meeting much of his family and the vast majority of the guests, and they seemed to be overwhelmingly Catholic. I hadn’t traveled halfway across the country to create controversy. I was there to support my friend and help make his wedding a smooth and happy occasion.
It seemed to me that the best way to fulfill my role was to ignore the priest’s admonition and just quietly go ahead and receive the host. Interestingly, after twenty years, I’m not 100 percent sure what I wound up doing. I have fuzzy memories both of taking communion that day and not taking communion. I do have a clear memory that one of the groom’s brothers, an irregular church attendee, quickly slipped off to do confession so he’d be in compliance.
I think the reason I can recall this incident at all is because I felt like the priest had violated the spirit of the moment by introducing this tension. I thought about this later on, when I saw that Pope Francis had said that “Communion is not a prize for the perfect. … Communion is a gift, the presence of Jesus and his Church.” He was arguing that communion should not be denied for political reasons, for example, a congregant’s position on abortion rights.
I don’t make it my practice to have strong opinions on how the Catholic religion goes about its business, but I welcomed Pope Francis’s perspective based on my own limited experience from the wedding.
In the intervening two decades, one in five American Catholics have left the church. Presumably, the majority of them left due to discomfort with the sexual abuse scandals. Some, however, must have left for other reasons, including the way communion is treated by some of the more conservative priests and bishops. That, of course, is none of my business or concern. But it’s interesting that conservatives within the Church won’t defer to Pope Francis’s guidance on the issue.
U.S. Roman Catholic Bishops this week are expected to revisit whether President Joe Biden’s support for abortion rights should disqualify him from receiving communion, an issue that has deepened rifts in the church since the Democrat took office.
At a Nov. 15-18 conference in Baltimore, the bishops are scheduled to vote on a document clarifying the meaning of Holy Communion, a sacrament central to the faith. A committee drafted the document after the bishops’ June conference, where they debated whether to take a position on the eligibility of prominent Catholics such as Biden – whose political actions they say contradict church teaching – to receive communion.
It’s my personal opinion that the primary reason Christianity has thrived in America even as it withered in Europe is that America has, from an early point, done a better job of keeping religion and politics separated. Most notably, the federal government has never been associated with any denomination. We’ve never had a federal religion, and it’s been a very long time since any of our states/colonies have had an official religion. When scandals hit a church, they remain self-contained rather than implicating the entire political Establishment, as happened in Ireland, for example, in the 1990’s. This winds up protecting both our state and religious institutions.
Now, some people may wish that Christianity wasn’t so vibrant and resilient in America, but that’s a different debate. My argument is that letting politics seep too much into religion is likely to harm rather than protect people’s faith. For this reason, I feel like these conservative U.S. bishops may be engaged in a self-defeating exercise. They’re worried that people like Joe Biden will lead their flock astray, but it’s possible that it’s their own intolerance that will have that effect by leading people out of the Church altogether.
Far better, in my humble opinion, to lean on their pastoral duties and go more lightly on the doctrinal enforcement.
I think you’ve touched on something very true (and important to those interested in religion and/or politics). People twist and misuse religion and, when they do so, they undermine the very religion they are trying to leverage. It’s ultimately a disservice to everyone. I’ve seen it in many contexts, having participated in many faiths. One sees it in an individual institution when one in power misuses that position for personal gain.
Religion seems to invite hypocrisy, perhaps because it espouses high ideals. I’m Jewish and was raised on the standard pro-Israel propaganda that not only overlooked the mistreatment of Palestinians but denied (and continues to deny) it. That doesn’t even permit the use of the terms Palestine or Palestinian as a way of denying the identity of the people of the land. These days, I see antisemitism weaponised against Palestinians and those who support their having a voice. It’s utter hypocrisy which undermines Judaism. Israeli politicians would have us believe that Zionism is Judaism and that one can’t be Jewish without supporting Israel. I assert that Zionism, like colonialism and oppression itself, is antithetical to and undermines Judaism.
Same for the impact of Wahabism and other forms of fundamentalism on Islam. I’ve taken shahada, having discovered the beauty of Islam through the door of Sufism, which is the mystical aspect of Islam. It was the singularly most powerful spiritual experience of my life and I discovered the incredible beauty of Islam, which brought me deeper into my Jewish faith as well. That aspect of Islam is denied by the fundamentalists who weaponize Islam for political purposes and ultimately undermine Islam itself. People across the world reject religion when it is misused.
There was a huge push toward fundamentalist interpretations of Islam in the United States that was silently unfolding beneath the surface under a constant barrage of Saudi money for decades. I have friends roughly my age who share their journey, their embrace of such teachings when they were young, even as their parents (more grounded in a moderate Islam) tried to steer them away. Then 9/11 happened and it was like a smack across the face. They suddenly saw behind the veil and realized they had been snookered. A lot of American Muslims turned away from forms of fundamentalism in the shadow of that tragedy. Just as American Jews turn away from Israel as we witness crimes against humanity that we cannot deny.
The Israeli government and their supporters tell us we don’t have enough information because we don’t live in Israel. That’s like telling someone they don’t know enough about lynching to condemn it because they didn’t grow up in Mississippi. We know right from wrong. We are outraged by the ways in which our religions are misused and we cannot it. In fact, we stand against it and our opposition is a testament to our idealism and a commitment to our faith.
Politicizing religion seems like a bad idea.
If Conservatives want even more people inside and outside of their families to abandon religion, and especially Christianity, then trying to get the State to adopt it and politicize it is definitely the most efficient and effective way to accomplish that goal.
A non-Christian friend of mine recently asked if she showed up at an Eastern Orthodox Church, could she take communion. I’m Orthodox, though a rather bad, liberal Orthodox Christian. But the question hit me as both horrifying and funny. Of course you can’t take communion at an Orthodox Church if you aren’t Orthodox. She asked why not and the best explanation i could come up with is that Christianity is a mystery cult and if you haven’t undergone initiation, then you can’t take part in the rites. That’s just how mystery cults work.
Many in conservative Catholic and Orthodox circles are advocating for a limit to the size of the Church. Far better, in their opinion, to have a smaller church that is righteous than a loose, large church.
I disagree, but I’m a bad Christian, so my opinion doesn’t count for much.
3
5
5