“Womenpriests”, “Lover Blessings”, and Communion for Biden?

So welcome to the Counsel of Trent podcast. I’m your host Catholic Answers apologist and speaker, Trent Horn. On Tuesdays and Thursdays. We talk apologetics, theology, how to explain and defend our Catholic faith. Fridays, we talk about whatever I want to talk about, those are free for all Fridays. They’re always a lot of fun. I looked at the reviews recently for the podcast, and if you haven’t left a review at iTunes or Google Play, be sure to do that. It’s always really nice to do that. Helps people to learn more about the podcast. If you’re watching this on YouTube, be sure to click subscribe, but people really seem to enjoy the free for all Fridays. So we will keep showing them. If you’re listening to the podcast, by the way, all these episodes are also available on the Counsel of Trent YouTube channel. Be sure to go and check it out there.

So I was reading through these articles and what I want to do now is I’m going to go through them and point out some interesting observations I had while going through them. So here’s the first one. It comes from Commonweal, more of a left-wing Catholic magazine. It’s called Priesthood, Reimagined, and the byline it’s simply, Women Priests. I don’t know why they just call themselves priests. I think they think that priest is a masculine term related to just a masculine identity, which it is. Even in the ancient world they knew there were priests and priestesses. This is by Mary Kate Holman, it’s published May 5th, so just few days ago. And basically, I mean, it’s just the same story, not the same story, but going on since the second Vatican council, there was a big resurgence in those who were proposing for female ordination for women priests. I mean, when you combine that with radical feminism, the second wave feminism that emerged in the 1960s, in the 1970s, you have a perfect storm for this.

In a previous podcast, I talked about feminist theology and most of what I find there is ambiguous to say at the least and downright heretical at the worst. And so Mary Daley, who taught at Boston College, actually, if you go back to my previous episode, you’ll see what she got most in trouble for at Boston College was that she had a graduate seminar that she would only allow women to attend. And the college said, no, you can’t have a seminar where you don’t allow men to attend. But she argued in her books saying that women priests are not enough, you have to tear down the priesthood itself because the idea of having an authoritative priesthood is masculine or patriarchal. And so it’s not just stuff. It’s not just, oh, you men are priests and we want women to be priests too and to be equal in this respect. They don’t believe there should be a priesthood. They don’t believe there should be a church. Frankly, they don’t believe there should be Christianity.

They’re one step removed from Unitarian universalism. If you ever been to a Unitarian service, I have, they’re fascinating. Unitarians believe they’re a church without a creed. And so, as long as you believe in the basic fatherhood of God and brotherhood of man, though, if you’re an atheist, they probably won’t care. That’s what a lot of this theology lends itself towards. So I want to point out two things that are interesting in this article, Priesthood, Reimagined, at Commonweal. So in 2002, a group of seven Catholic women gathered on a cruise ship on the Danube River, there in a ceremony led by three male bishops outside the jurisdiction of any diocese, or fake bishops, they were ordained as priests. According to the church’s code of Canon law, this was illicit. You bet it was, only men can receive the sacrament of holy orders, but the women who likened their defiance to an act of civil disobedience, insist to this day that their ordinations are valid known as the Danube Seven. They gave birth to a movement active mainly in the United States and Canada that has since ordained nearly 200 women priests.

So it goes through and talks about a book on the subject by Jill Peterfeso called, Womanpriest: Tradition and Transgression. And so it’s all pretty similar here. But so let me read this part. Most of the sacramental practices of, I think they call themselves Roman Catholic women, priests, RCWP, would be familiar to contemporary Catholics. They gather around the Eucharistic table, celebrate marriages, anoint the sick, offer reconciliation. Though their ordinations trigger immediate excommunications, they believe that they’re valid Roman Catholics. But it goes on to say, this enables them to reimagine certain elements of Catholic practice they find troubling. Gone, for example, is the requirement for priestly celibacy. Many women-priests are mothers and grandmothers and some are in committed lesbian relationships. Shocker. They also take a more open, inclusive approach to Catholic sacraments, officiating at sacramental marriages for same-sex couples and offering the Eucharist to all regardless of age, marital status or religious affiliation.

So I want to focus on this part here because when people get into debates about whether women should be priests, I think sometimes we approach it a little bit in the abstract and in too much of an abstract way. The reason that the church offers and Pope Saint John Paul, the second, talked about this, the primary reason is that the church, it’s not that the church chooses to not ordain women, it’s that the church is unable to ordain women because Christ did not give his church the authority to do that. Instead, the church imitates Christ who only chose men to be apostles. You know, I say, well, Jesus lived in a sexist time so he could have never chosen a woman to be an apostle. Jesus is God, he can do whatever he wants. And the fact of the matter is, in the ancient world, there were religions with priestesses. So it might not have gone over well with Jews, but it might’ve been a big rousing success for a lot of pagans and say, oh, that’s just like our mystery religion. That’s just like our temple cult.

So I think that argument that, oh, Jesus could never go against the culture of his time, but we can, fails to take into account that Jesus is God. And even at that time, he had women following him. He had women, trusted women, within his own circle. His mother, Mary, the Theotokos, the God bearer, deserves the highest praise of all creatures. And she was present even at Pentecost and yet she was not chosen to be an apostle. And so that’s the primary reason. Then there’s other secondary theological reasons that have been put forward for why women cannot be priests. One is that if the priest is in persona cristae, then Jesus did not just become man, he did not just become a sexually, amorphous human. He did not just become man, he became a man and becoming man and essential aspect of Jesus’s identity is being male.

So theologically, it seems very incongruent for the priest to say, this is my body to stand in the person of Christ and yet not be able to exemplify that essential element of Christ’s incarnated identity, which would be his maleness. So that’s more of a secondary reason that’s been offered by theologians. But I think another reason that we should put forward this wouldn’t even, it’d be a tertiary reason. It’s not like a knock-down argument, but it’s something to make people think. And that would be when Jesus said by your fruits, you shall know them. By your fruits, you shall know them. You shall know a false prophet, a wolf in sheep’s clothing. You’ll know them by their fruits. Because when we approach this, when you’re debating other people, including people of goodwill, you have Catholic friends and family members who only go to Mass on, let’s say, Easter and Christmas.

And so they have pretty wonky views on the sacraments or theology. And they may say, maybe we should have women priests, maybe it would fix this up a little bit. And maybe they’re not for abortion. Maybe they’re not even for homosexuality. Well, odds are, if they’re in that demographic, they probably are. But let’s say that they aren’t. And they may say, they imagine that these women-priests would be identical to male priests, they would teach the same deposit of faith, confect the Eucharist. They would do everything the same as their Orthodox, trusted male priest at their parish, it would just happen to be a woman. And they say, well, what’s wrong with that? But here’s the thing, it doesn’t work out like that. By your fruits, you shall know them. I think that this argument should, at the very least, make anyone skeptical of proposals for female ordination because it doesn’t stop there.

It’s not what they want. They don’t want the Catholic church with feminists as priests. They want feminists to remake the Catholic church in their own image. And you see this here that they want to jettison the teaching on homosexuality, jettison the teaching on abortion, jettison the teaching, frankly, on the real presence of Christ and the Eucharist, or if they believe in that, it doesn’t matter that anyone can receive it because it’s not about receiving the sacrifice of Calvary represented under bread and wine that we do so with fear and trembling before the altar, that we examine ourselves, as Paul says in 1st Corinthians 11, which we’ll talk about when we talk about pro-choice or pro-abortion, catholic politicians receiving the Eucharist. It’s not even about any of that. So I think it’s important to point out, look, if you’re in favor of women-priests, you’re basically indirectly in favor of the church not just tolerating abortion, but blessing abortion, blessing same-sex unions. But also, here’s something interesting in this article, because when I read about women-priests, it’s like, same old same old.

There is something that they are concerned about and that would be clericalism. So it says here, “While women-priests proclaim their resistance to clericalism at every turn, it nonetheless remains a serious challenge for their ministry.” Peterfeso explains that the tension between their spiritual chrism and institutional authority emerges constantly often in seemingly mundane ways. Take the question of whether they should wear Roman colors, which presents a kind of catch 22. Okay. So you have these feminists arguing for the female priesthood. But as I said before, deep down, they don’t even believe in a priesthood. They don’t believe in this kind of authoritative structure because any kind of structure where someone is authoritative over other people, they would say is patriarchal. So they’re wondering, should they even wear Roman collars at all to identify that they’re priests?

And so Peterfeso writes, “If women-priests claim an indelible essential transformation, they fall into the clerical power trap they seek to avoid. If they do not claim a transformation, they may lose some of their ordained authenticity.” So it’s like, okay, are you a real priest or not? So has your soul been changed, given the indelible mark that men receive when they receive the sacrament of holy orders? If these feminists fake priests say that yeah, it has, well then they’re saying that they are ontologically different than the laity. And they want to say no, no, no, no. We’re all gathered at the table together. Gather us in. They want the hippy dippy 1960s. They don’t want this talk of ontological change of the soul.

But then if they don’t receive the spiritual mark, who cares, you’re just playing dress up. You’re just like the rest of the laity. Are we all priests? Yes. We’re all priests. And I think that’s basically where they end up going with this. Then it says, and of course we are all priests in the sense that we all share in the Royal priesthood, but we are not all ministerial priests. We cannot all confect the Eucharist. We cannot all administer the sacrament of reconciliation, but that’s not what they think. To blur these distinctions, at least during the liturgy, most women priests invite worshipers to co-consecrate the Eucharist. Their sacramental authority thus becomes not an exclusive personal privilege, but a communal gift.

So remember, we’ll talk about women-priests, by your fruits, you shall know them. And frankly, they don’t want women-priests because deep down the activists were pushing for this, they don’t even believe in the priesthood at all. They don’t believe in the essential element of the priest being that intermediary to be the one who offers the sacrifice of Christ on the altar because his soul has been transformed in an irreversible way by receiving the sacramental orders. They just, they don’t believe it.

All right, here’s the next one I saw and that triggered an eye roll on the plane so loud, the flight attendant had to come over to make sure I was okay. Well, I mean, I roll my eyes. I shouldn’t really because anything that says German parishes want to do X, you should always be prepared for wackiness. When my wife and I were on our honeymoon, eight years ago, we went all through Europe. We got rail passes. I will say, honestly, the place that I enjoyed the most for its beauty was Switzerland. Number one is for the outdoor beauty and the landscape. I mean, when you’re in the Alps, nothing beats that. I mean, the churches in Rome are beautiful, but for natural beauty, you can’t beat Switzerland, and Southern Germany, Bavaria. It’s a beautiful area of the country. I loved it. Loved the food. Then you try to go to mass, it’s weird stuff. It’s weird, weird stuff.

I don’t even have to know German to know that it’s weird to see what’s going on. So I should be prepared for this kind of stuff. But it was just in the headline, Blessings for Lovers. I hate that. I hate the term when we try to refer to a sinful sexual relationship, so a sexual relationship outside of the marital bond, whether it’s adultery, fornication, or sodomy. So, I mean, if you think about it, sinful sexual relationships are going to fall usually into one of those three. I mean, there’s going to be others that deal with paraphilias or very strange sexual behaviors. I don’t want to talk about that right now because it doesn’t make me feel well to talk about those things. But when you think about the term, lovers, to be used to describe, it’s usually, here what’s talking about is a plan blessings for adultery, fornication, or sodomy. And it’s going to be one of those three. So just to cover up the language there with that, it’s kind of like the Associated Press recently, not recently, a few years ago, it just re-posted a tweet about it a few months ago, said that the Associated Press is not supposed to refer to a woman in an adulterous relationship as a mistress because there’s no corresponding term, that’s at least popular for the man instead, to refer to her as a lover.

I mean the term, lover, it’s kind of like when we talk about abortion as choice. Like, oh, choice is a great thing. So instead of saying the word abortion, which is ugly, we’re going to talk about the right to choose. And so we always fall into a trap if we just talk about, okay, well, we’ll talk about the right to choose. I know this is your choice, but not all choices. No, you don’t want to fall into the trap of using benign language like choice instead saying, should abortion be legal? Should it be legal to dismember a human being before they’re born? Much the same way should we bless lovers? How about say, should we bless adulterers? Should we bless fornicators? Should we bless sodomites? Are these actions good or are these actions gravely evil? That’s what we need to be talking about.

The people who were involved, just because someone who was involved in a sinful act may be engaging in other good acts, that doesn’t mean we ought to bless the sinful act itself. So this was published, it’s on the National Catholic Reporter, but it’s reposted from the Catholic News Service. And it says in Germany, Catholic chaplains in parishes across Germany planned to invite people to blessing services for lovers on and around May 10th, the campaign, Love Wins, was launched in Homburg reported the German Catholic news agency, KNA. The campaign’s website said the aim was to celebrate the diversity of people’s different life plans and love stories and to ask for God’s blessing. Gay and lesbian couples are invited, which is attracting public attention because the Vatican congregation for the doctrine of the faith said in mid-March that the Catholic church had no authority to bless same-sex relationships. That was mid-March when the CDF’s document about blessing same-sex unions came out. It’s May now. Do you feel like this year is going like rapid fire?

I feel like with 2020, we were getting into this mode, like we just wanted 2020 to be over. So we want time to move faster and we’re still stuck in that gear. So I feel like 2021 is just going by in the blink of an eye. So KNA reported the Vatican statement has been widely criticized among Catholics in Germany. Go figure. The Catholics in Germany, not liking Catholic teaching. Now there are orthodox good people in Germany, so I’m not disparaging them. But when you look at the statistics of public belief there, though to be frank, Catholics in America, if you did a poll of everybody who identifies as Catholic, that’s why it’s hard.

You know what’s funny, I was talking with a Protestant friend recently, I’ve known this guy for 10 years, over a decade. And so we were chatting and then we were talking about differences between Catholics and Protestants and having that, I know you’re Catholic, I know you’re Protestant, but let’s talk about our agreements and differences and trying to always reach out and share the faith even with people you’ve been friends for a long time with, you just have to do it in a gracious way. And he said, well look, one of the objections I have to Catholicism is what does it mean to be Catholic? Like you, Trent, you’re super Orthodox as a Catholic, but I know other people who say they’re Catholic and they think abortion’s okay. They think homosexuality is okay. And I said to him, I said, you know what, you’re right, because the term Catholic has become so elastic, so stretchable in the public imagination. It’s like the term, Christian, I said to him. Like if you asked someone, they say I’m a Christian, do you have any idea what that means? Probably not.

But if you ask them, are you an evangelicalism, and he would identify as an evangelical, he would say, yeah, I would understand that. I would say, yeah, and it’s similar in Catholicism. Like the word Catholic has gotten really stretched. But if you ask some, if they say, oh, I’m a … frankly, if they say I’m a Latin Mass Catholic, a traditionalist Catholic, a Byzantine Catholic, I have an easier time zeroing in on what they believe rather than just Catholic itself. Though I did say to my Protestant friend, I said, I agree with you that among Protestantism, you have the same problem. People say they’re Christian, they don’t uphold basic Christian beliefs.

In Catholicism, there’s people who say they’re Catholic, but they don’t hold what the Catholic church teaches. And I told him, however, we do have an authoritative structure, instead of just sola scriptura and the Bible, and I’m Christian, you’re Christian and we each decide from our own personal beliefs, what to believe, at least people who identify as Catholic, who say they are Catholic, but they are for women-priests, they’re for abortion, for homosexuality. They can at least say what I believe is not what the Catholic church currently teaches, though I would love for it to change. They at least can be upfront and honest to say, yeah, I believe this. It’s not what Catholicism teaches, but it’s what I believe. But you can’t really do that in Protestantism because there is no authority to say, this is what Christianity teaches if you hold to something like sola scriptura.

Here’s another part I found here, that the defenses of blessing same-sex couples or not just that, what about divorce, remarried couples? Not even divorced and remarried, what if somebody shows up, he’s married to one woman and he shows up with his wife and his mistress who his wife tolerates. And he says, Hey, can you bless all of us? There’s a lot of love here. A lot of love going around. Why not? I mean, it’s just a different life plan and love story. So, where do they come up with this stuff, right? Here’s one kind of argument I’ve heard frequently from people who say, well, why don’t we just bless same-sex unions, what’s the big deal? This is Father Burkhard Hose. I hope I’m pronouncing it all correctly. I have blessed buildings and sugar beet harvesting machines, so why not also people who love each other. And so that’s when I’ve heard a lot. It’s like, well, we bless all kinds of things. We bless tractors. We bless dogs. We bless people’s throats on the feast day of Saint Blaze. So why not bless a same-sex couple? We’ll no, we don’t bless everything.

Should we bless the suction [inaudible 00:21:21] machine that’s going to be used in an abortion? Do we bless the printing press that is specifically used to produce pornographic magazines? No, we don’t bless everything. And so while the individuals involved in a same-sex blessing, and you can go back to my previous episode that I did back in mid-March on this very subject where I talk about this, the individuals to be involved, there are two men involved in a same-sex relationship, the fact that they could receive a blessing for themselves as an individual, they want to go on the feast day of St. Blaze and have their throat blessed, but blessing a relationship that is rooted in sexual immorality as its core identity, that’s not appropriate because as the CDF said, back in mid-March, the church cannot bless sin. It blesses sinners, but it cannot bless sin itself.

All right. Now the last thing I want to talk about is this issue related to the Eucharist and Catholic politicians who support legal abortion. So this is an article from the National Catholic Reporter by Michael Sean Winters. But you can find similar takes in America Magazine, and it’s called Weaponizing the Eucharist: The bishops, Not Biden, cause scandal. So it’s not scandalous that the second Catholic president in history firmly supports abortion being legal. He even supports repealing the Hyde Amendment so that federal tax dollars are used to support abortion, to pay for abortions, that he supports the legal redefinition of marriage. He supports transgender ideology, that’s not the scandal. The scandal is that the bishops might withhold the Eucharist from him specifically for his position on abortion, that that’s apparently the scandal. And you see other people saying well, the bishops, they shouldn’t play politics. They shouldn’t be involved in politics. They shouldn’t withhold the Eucharist as a weapon against a politician that they disagree with.

No, withholding the Eucharist from someone is an act of mercy towards them because as 1st Corinthians chapter 11 says, when you receive the Eucharist, we, if you receive it in an unworthy state, you eat and drink judgment upon yourself. That’s why it is a mortal sin to receive the Eucharist in a state of mortal sin. Now, I’m not making a proclamation that Biden or anybody else is in a state of mortal sin. I’m not capable of looking at somebody’s soul. And that’s the other argue, you can’t see someone’s soul so how could you withhold the Eucharist from them? You can’t see their soul, but you can see their actions. And if someone engages in gravely evil actions, not only is it for their benefit, but by withholding the Eucharist from them, especially if they are a prominent individual, like a well-known politician, it serves to prevent scandals.

Scandal comes from a Greek word, it’s a stone you trip over and you fall. From keeping people like Catholic politicians from being the stumbling blocks that cause people to fall to think, oh, abortion’s not that bad. I mean, look, here’s Biden, he receives Eucharist. He goes to mass. He’s in good standing with the church and he’s pro choice. Why can’t I be pro-choice in that regard? And so when you have these critics and Winters is one of them and there’s others that, as I said in America Magazine and others who say the church shouldn’t be political in withholding the Eucharist to Catholic politicians. My argument for them is, all right, when should the church withhold the Eucharist from a Catholic politician? So these people at America Magazine or the National Catholic Reporter, let me ask you this. If Trump were Catholic, let’s say Trump became Catholic and then still held all of his views as precedent, these individuals from more liberal and left leaning Catholic periodicals, websites. Do you think that they would want the bishops to tell Trump he can’t receive communion until he repents of sins like racism, however they define it?

I mean, think of it as a thought experiment, these same people who say that the bishops are causing scandal by considering withholding the Eucharist from Biden or Pelosi or other Catholic politicians who support abortion. They are offended by that, but if Trump or a conservative politician, they did not like was Catholic, wouldn’t they demand that the Eucharist be withheld from these individuals? It’s such a double standard because I want to ask them, I mean, that’s my question for them. For those who say the Eucharist should not be withheld from politicians who uphold legal abortion, when should it be upheld?

I mean, when should it be withheld? When should the church say, no, we are not going to, we can not in good conscience, give you the Eucharist because of the odious political positions that you hold. And so if it’s okay to give a politician the Eucharist because they vote for and actively support the legality of dismembering small children, what’s off the table, nothing. Nothing. I want to ask these people, Winters and others like them, go back 60 years, go back to the 1960s during the civil rights movement, racial segregation. There’s a great article here, I’ll include it in the show notes at trenthornpodcast.com from the Catholic Education Resource Center called Bishops Have Denied Communion Before by Tim Townsend. And there’s a picture here in the article of Archbishop Joseph Rummel. He was the Archbishop of New Orleans, and he worked to integrate all of the Catholic schools in New Orleans when several members of the laity formed a committee to oppose him because they wanted to uphold racial segregation.

And Archbishop Rummel said, no, racial segregation is an evil, it is a sin. And if you oppose racial integration at Catholic schools in New Orleans, you’re ex-communicated. Good. Racism is evil. Racism is a sin. And those, especially Catholic politicians who would support an evil like racial segregation, the Eucharist should be withheld from them. And I bet most of these other, Winters and others who have been arguing in America Magazine and other places that the Eucharist should be withheld from pro-abortion politicians are arguing that it should not be withheld. I’m sure they would say, oh, they would. And that’s the argument actually. I know one of these advocates has said, well, if we withhold the Eucharist from Catholic politicians who support abortion, then we have to also withhold it from Catholic politicians who support racism.

And so the argument is, if you, this is one of the other arguments I think is just terrible. That if you withhold the Eucharist from a Catholic politician because they support legal abortion, you’re going to have to withhold it from every politician or from everybody, because everybody’s a sinner. Yes, everybody’s a sinner, but not everybody, when they have the power to cast their vote as an elected official votes to uphold or expand the dismembering of small human beings. That to argue in this way to make all sins equivalent is just silly. It’s just absurd to try to water down sin because you want to protect a politician, frankly, who aligns with your political views and so your bias in that regard.

Now some of you will say, yeah, what about these other conservative politicians? Hey, look, if there’s somebody who endorses any kind of grave sin, whether it’s abortion or racism, withhold the Eucharist from them. But here’s the problem because you’ll have these people, even bishops, who’ve made this argument saying, well, if you withhold it from pro-choice, pro-abortion politicians, what about politicians who are racist? The problem here is that the term abortion, we all agree on what abortion is. Abortion is the removal or expulsion of an unborn child from the womb with the intent of ending that child’s life. If you just removing them from the womb, that’s childbirth, if you want them to live its birth. If you want them to die, that’s abortion. So we understand what abortion is, what the act of abortion is. We understand what the act of euthanasia is, but there is no act of racism. There are racist acts, but there is no act of racism.

So you’ll have people who say, well, this person is racist. I mean, that’s a term that’s been thrown around so much. It’s thrown around. You have people like Ibram X. Kendi. Go back to my previous episode on should Catholics be an anti-racist, who they have argued that if you are not anti-racist, if you don’t subscribe to their political ideology, if you are not an anti-racist like them, you are a racist.

So the problem here is I would agree that the grave sin of racism, like someone, if a politician voted to say that black students should not be allowed to go to schools with white students, they should have the Eucharist withheld from them. But that’s a concrete act of gravely, evil racism. But when other people say, oh, what about all these other things? We’re not even in agreement about whether that’s racism or not. So it’s not a fair comparison to make. And so there’s justification for this in the code of Canon law.

Now, some people will say, well, look, if Biden is pro choice, doesn’t that mean? He’s automatically excommunicated? No, because the code of Canon law says that excommunication is incurred by somebody who procures an abortion and nearly all Canon lawyers will tell you that the way that the code of Canon law is written, that to procure an abortion means you’d have to be the woman who submits to an abortion, the man who pays for an abortion, the doctor who performs an abortion, you’d have to be directly involved in the act itself, not just a politician who upholds it.

Now, you might say, well, but the politician upholds it, they allow for many abortions to take place, that’s gravely evil. That’s right, but not every gravely evil act leads to automatic excommunication. Murder and rape, for example, are gravely evil, but they’re not ex-communicable offenses. the church. Some can lawyers say that the church includes automatic excommunication for abortion in the code of Canon law. Whereas, it doesn’t include murder or rape in there. It includes abortion. One reason is proposed is that because so many civil governments have failed to make a stand to defend the unborn that the church, at least in its own code of law will defend the unborn and include abortion under the code of excommunication when so many civil governments will not.

So you can’t say that Biden or other pro-choice politicians are excommunicated because of their support of legal abortion. Canonically, that doesn’t work. What you could say, if you go to the code of Canon law in the section dealing with the Eucharist, starting in Canon 9:12, this is on participation in the most holy Eucharist. It says in Canon 9:12, any baptized person not prohibited by law can and must be admitted to holy communion, but you can be by law prevented from receiving communion. And that is where we will go down to Canon 9:15, which says those who have been ex-communicated or interdicted, which is a lower canonical penalty than excommunication, which is the most serious, after the imposition or declaration of the penalty and, here’s the key part, others obstinately persevering in manifest grave sin are not to be admitted to holy communion.

So Canon 9:15 says if you’ve been ex-communicated or suffered a canonical penalty, you cannot be admitted to communion. Most people understand that if you’re ex-communicated. And it says, and others obstinately persevering in manifest grave sin are not to be admitted to holy communion. And so bishops and pastors, they’re in disagreement about whether they should apply Canon 9:15 to Catholic politicians who defend legal abortion. I think they should. There are bishops who believe they should. There are bishops who don’t believe in applying the canon in this way. And I think this is unfortunate.

So when it comes to Biden in particular, and Pelosi would fall into this and other pro-choice Catholic politicians, how should we address that? You go back to to Winters’ editorial, Weaponizing the Eucharist. He says something here about the unfair blame that is placed on someone like Biden. And so, yeah, what he says here, Biden is not performing abortions and he has never, to my knowledge, questioned the church’s teaching on abortion. Whoop-de-doo. That’s the typical line going all the way back to Kennedy. I’m personally opposed to abortion, but I can’t take away the right to choose. I’m personally opposed to lynching, but I can’t take away a mob’s right to choose. You see how nonsensical that is? That he’s not trying to change church teaching like Catholics for Choice. No, he’s facilitating the legal homicide of small human beings.

So he says, I wish both sides would try. My Catholic friends who are Republicans face this difficulty. Well, he says, “Biden, if he is wrong, I think he is.” He is. “He is wrong about how to properly relate a Catholic’s necessary commitment to the protection of all human life with the political realities he faces. My Catholic friends who are Republicans face the exact same kind of difficulty on other issues. I wish both sides would try and convince their fellow politicians and the public at large, that the church is correct about abortion, immigration, poverty, the environment, racism.” I think what Winters is getting at here when we’re talking about Biden is he’s saying, well, look guys, I mean, he doesn’t say the church is wrong on abortion. He’s just got political realities. The democratic party believes abortion should be legal and he’s their top guy. He can’t go against his party. He can’t do that. Cow dung. Cow dung, on that. You are a human being with a conscience. You cast your vote and you do the right thing. And if you don’t do the right thing, you can be held responsible for your actions.

So this idea here, he says, well, I think what they might try to argue is, okay, Trent, look, he is not in a position to outlaw abortion. And no, he can’t do that with a stroke of a pen, but he could try. he could make steps in that direction, which is what any Catholic in that position should. But it’s not just that. What I would argue to make the case when someone says withholding the Eucharist from Biden or Pelosi or others would be not just their stance that abortion ought to remain legal, but it would be actions that they take that go above and beyond. So, yeah, Biden with the stroke of a pen, can’t undo abortion, but he can do things to hinder the abortion movement or to help it. And if he does things to help it, then that should be very clear. That should be just abundantly clear that he is persisting in manifest grave sin.

For example, in 2019, Biden changed his view on the Hyde Amendment. So the Hyde Amendment was put in a spending bills back in 1976, and it prevents federal dollars from being used to fund elective abortion. And Biden, for a long time, and other Democrats believe the Hyde Amendment was a good compromise. They’re saying, look, abortion should be legal, the government isn’t necessarily going to pay for it. But in 2019, Biden changed his view on the Hyde Amendment saying that he was in favor of getting rid of it and then using federal dollars to then fund abortion. So here’s my thing, if he goes through with it and repeals the Hyde Amendment, if he goes through with it and does that, then I think the bishops should say that communion should definitely be withheld from it.

This is not just a case of him failing to do the right thing a Catholic ought to do in his position as president, it would be a Catholic promoting, encouraging, and expanding the grave sin of abortion. And any Catholic who would do that should suffer a consequence and understand that they have participated in a grave evil. Their soul is in jeopardy, and they need to come back to the church with reconciliation and penance to do the right thing by their soul and the right thing of the souls of the hundreds of thousands of little children that are put at risk through an action like this.

So these are … it’s tough times, but it’s always been tough times for the church. It’s always been tough times. You’ve had heresy, societal collapse and destabilization, but Jesus said, I built my church upon this rock. I built my church. The gates of hell will not prevail against it. And so we have to know that the battle is God’s. The war is God’s. The ultimate victory is his, and he’s given us these fights within the drama of salvation and we have to be people of good courage to continue them. And in doing that, to put forward a defense of the church’s teaching on faith and morals, but to do so in a way that is persuasive, that is logically airtight, but is also gracious towards those who disagree with us without falling into a mealy-mouth, live and let live attitude. Well no, we have the truth, but we should present it, we should speak the truth in love as Saint Paul says in Ephesians 4:15.

So, hey, that was a lot today, but a lot of important things. I hope it was helpful for you all. And I just hope that you have a very blessed day.

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