Throughout history, there have been Church debates — either locally or with the powers at the Vatican — that have had far-reaching and long-term consequences on the lived and intellectual history of Catholicism.
One of them, for instance, was the “Chinese rites” controversy in the 17thand 18thcenturies. This would influence the way the Church approached Chinese traditions and cultures, as well religious pluralism, right up until at least the dawn of the Second Vatican Council (1962-65).
We are at a similar juncture in ecclesiology — i.e. the way we conceive of the Catholic Church.
Catholic politicians and abortion
Take the recent controversy surrounding Catholic politicians in the United States and the reception of the Eucharist. It has pitted a “party” within the US Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) against President Joe Biden and has again revealed that the USCCB is out of step with the pastoral approach of Pope Francis.
This situation is worrying for more than just those who are directly involved because the way this issue is played out will have consequences on the future of the Church and its self-understanding.
Many US bishops have been urging the USCCB to release a document that would bar — or at least intimidate — Catholic politicians who favour the current laws that legalize abortion from receiving Holy Communion at Mass.
This is something that has already affected the liturgical habits of some prominent Catholic politicians, as a US senator revealed in a recent interview with the Jesuit-run magazine, America.
At the USCCB summer gathering last June, some 73% of the bishops voted in favour of drafting such a document.
The proposal was backed by 168 of the 273 prelates eligible to vote. Only 55 opposed the plan, while another six abstained. (The 160 retired bishops in the conference cannot cast a ballot.)
A document on the Eucharist
After the vote in June, a special commission got busy drafting a document on the Eucharist, which the bishops will vote on this week as they gather in Baltimore for the USCCB’s annual “fall meeting”.
The document does not mention the issue of politicians and Communion. But the character of the discussion that takes place this week and in its aftermath will have an impact on the Church, no matter what the text’s final version or whether it is approved by the necessary two-thirds majority.
The bishops have never threatened to deny Communion to conservative politicians who approve of other laws that are in clear contrast with the Church, such as the death penalty.
William Barr, a Catholic who actively promoted capital punishment as attorney general under Donald Trump, was never subjected to the sort of treatment the bishops are displaying towards Biden and other Democrats.
Still, there is no question that the way the United States has gone about legalising abortion, very differently from the approach most countries in Europe have taken, is highly problematic for Catholic teaching, to say the least.
And, certainly, the Church’s pastors have a duty to teach on the subject.
The sacraments and the “culture wars”
But the problem is that the entire effort to penalize politicians of one political party is not just an accident. It is a feature of contemporary Catholicism’s “culture wars”, which began in the United States in 1980s and continued to spread in the 1990s.
The decade that began with the fall of Communism was marked by a search for a new identity and meaning, a separate new symbolic universe. Then in 2001 the 9/11 attacks sparked the globalization of these American culture wars.
The tension that currently exists between the Vatican and the contingent of US bishops over the issue of Biden and the Eucharist signals a further escalation of the Catholic culture wars, which have now invaded the field of the Church’s sacraments.
This is a new phenomenon.
While in the past century some in the Church have politicized certain popular devotions (e.g. to the Virgin Mary or the Sacred Heart), the sacraments were never politicized per se.
Indeed, the Holy Office did excommunicate Communists in 1949, during the pontificate of Pius XII. But this is not a fitting example, because it is the story of a failure.
When the then-Cardinal Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli’s private secretary told him that some overzealous Catholics had complained about seeing Communists receive Holy Communion during a Mass at his Sotto il Monte birthplace, the future John XXIII explained:
A person comes to the confessional, not the party or an ideology. This person is entrusted to our catechesis, our love, and our pastoral inventiveness.
It is necessary to proceed on a case-by-case basis, with extreme caution. If you force something on them drastically, they will not understand you, or they will understand backwards; if you reject them, they will go away and never come back.
What’s happening to Catholicism in the United States?
Pope Francis and his Vatican aides are trying to protect Joe Biden’s access to the sacraments.
This was made especially clear in a letter that Cardinal Luis Ladaria, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, send to the USCCB president last May.
The pope’s concern is not so much about Biden, but about what is happening to Catholicism in the United States.
What is at stake here is the catholicity of the Catholic Church — in the sense of non-sectarian and non-partisan.
This is not only a problem of the Church’s credibility, but also of its self-understanding as a sacrament of salvation, as stated in the first chapter of Lumen Gentium, the Vatican II constitution on the Church.
The Catholic Church is currently living a moment that is the closest we can get to the time of the Council.
John XXIII called Vatican II in 1959 and published his most important encyclical, Pacem in Terris, in April 1963, a few months after the Cuban missile crisis.
The context was the Cold War, and the pope’s intention was not just to contribute to world peace, but also to protect the Church from the all-absorbing ideological clash between Communism and the “free world”.
A battlefield for the culture wars
In a similar way, Pope Francis has reintroduced a synodal culture in the Church and has opened a worldwide “synodal process” in the context of the culture wars.
He is trying to rescue the Church’s capability by rebuffing the constant calls to align with a single “us vs. them” civilizational and political identity – calls that are especially loud within US Catholicism.
A clear example of what the pope is up against was manifest recently by Archbishops José Gomez, the USCCB president, while delivering a deeply divisive address via video to a conference in Spain. Gomez shocked many Catholics by attacking movements of “social justice”, “wokeness”, “identity politics”, “intersectionality” and “successor ideology”, calling them pseudo-religions.
This blatant case of the USCCB’s politicization comes at a time when the Church can least afford it.
As Archbishop Mark Coleridge, president of the Australian Bishops’ Conference, tweeted on November 12, “If the Eucharist is made a marker of difference (hence exclusion) rather than a sacrament of communion (hence inclusion), we have the second rather than the first.”
The whole question is whether we see the Church as “a field hospital”, as Francis defined it in his September 2013 interview with Antonio Spadaro SJ, or whether we see it as a battlefield for the culture wars.
The battlefield is all about separating those who are friends from those who are the enemies.
Paraphrasing Carl von Clausewitz’s famous dictum about politics and war, it could be said that in the Catholic Church the extension of the battlefield mentality to the sacraments is the continuation of the culture wars by other means.
- Massimo Faggioli is a Church historian, Professor of Theology and Religious Studies at Villanova University (Philadelphia) and a much-published author and commentator. He is a visiting professor in Europe and Australia.
- First published in La-Croix International. Republished with permission.
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