After he was elected mayor of the mid-size town, hypothetical Mr. Vicious decided to join the Skinheads. He didn’t know how much longer before he’d be thrown out of office by voters for his racist rants, but he was making the most of the time he had. Maybe he could even talk voters into seeing things his way.
Every Saturday afternoon in the town square and every Sunday morning right after Mass at the local Catholic Church, Mr. Vicious delivered high-decibel denunciations of racial minorities as the direct cause of all the world’s problems. He said they caused overpopulation, and he’d understand if someone else said their babies should be starved rather than increase the crowding.
Everyone knew the mayor’s face. And he was always first in line to receive Holy Communion on Sunday morning, which is regarded as a sign of his unity with Christ and honest attempt to obey mandatory Catholic teaching.
The church’s pastor, while distributing Communion, said he didn’t feel it was his role to deny unity with Christ to anyone. Pretty soon, more Catholics decided it was publicly acceptable to be Skinheads, and did so.
Mr. Vicious had another problem – an uncontrollable temper. He became a wife-beater. Everyone soon understood why his wife had recurring facial bruises. When especially upset, the mayor would even turn and hit his wife while they both were waiting in the church Communion line to receive the Eucharist.
The pastor averted his eyes from the slamming fist in front of him and said it wasn’t his job to try to probe people as to the condition of their souls before giving them Communion. Wife-beating started to spread in the parish.
Another familiar face around town was the impenitent madam of the bordello down the road. She was a Catholic, too. On Sunday morning, she’d drive over to church for Mass and Communion, then drive right back to her dubious place of business.
It wasn’t his job, the pastor said, to withhold Communion from her, because it wasn’t his role to decide whether to hand out or deny sacramental rewards to parishioners.
The madam’s business grew more successful. Soon, some of the male Catholics followed her right over from church to her worksite.
There’s nothing remarkable about the mayor and the madam being sinners. That’s the universal condition of humanity.
At least once a week, their church offered a time for sinners to confess their faults privately in the sacrament of Reconciliation and pledge to reform their conduct. But the mayor and madam didn’t bother to do so, nor think they needed to.
For all they could tell, their pastor was okay with them. And they persisted in their public misconduct. They were breaking faith with the Church over fundamental moral requirements and misleading others into doing so as well.
This is a situation of prominently positioned people creating public scandal. No one’s saying the pastor should try to plant a listening device in parishioners’ homes to see if any private conversation is sinful, or dig through old public records hoping to find a long-ago drunken-driving conviction he can denounce from the pulpit.
This isn’t about making private conduct into a public scandal. This is public figures openly defying their Church’s basic moral teaching while intentionally trying to appear to be practicing Catholics.
Mr. Vicious and the madam are generic examples of giving bad example and leading others astray. For some real names, try U.S. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Vice President Joe Biden, among others.
They identify themselves as Roman Catholics and present themselves to receive Holy Communion as they please. They also promote, encourage and defend their Democratic Party’s off-the-tracks agenda including massive permissive abortion. The Catholic Church teaches abortion is a grave evil that unjustifiably takes the lives of innocent infants. Not one life or two or occasionally, but by the thousands every day.
As it happens, there’s even a Church rule, Canon 915, that provides the answer for the conduct of someone like Pelosi or Biden: “Those upon whom the penalty of excommunication or interdict has been imposed or declared, and others who obstinately persist in manifest grave sin, are not to be admitted to Holy Communion.”
If Pelosi and Biden and their team advocated doing to dogs what they promote doing to human preborn babies, they’d be shouted out of public life in shame. But while dogs have PETA on their side, Pelosi, Biden and their pals have Planned Parenthood on theirs.
Pelosi, Biden and their cohorts like living their own lives both ways – as faithful left-wing, party-platform Democrats playing for the votes and money of that crowd, and as practicing Catholics expecting the pew-sitters to see no contradiction between receiving Communion as a matter of course and keeping the abortion clinics’ suction machines roaring, sharp edges slashing, and pregnancy-attacking drugs and poisons flowing at full force.
The last thing these politicians want is being forced to make that decision they supposedly are so much in favor of – exercising their right to “choice.” Choose one side or the other. You can’t play on both teams at once.
However, one might say it’s not so much these Democrats’ fault for being double-faced. They’ve learned they can get away with it, so why not enjoy both worlds? It works for Mr. Vicious.
In 2007 Encounter Books brought out an examination by journalist Mark Stricherz of what happened to the national Democrats on abortion, Why the Democrats Are Blue. Stricherz wrote as a long-time Democrat, who didn’t approve of what had happened.
The Democrats pretty much had been a party including a large portion of traditionalist and working-class Catholics, Southerners and union members. But starting in the late 1960s, a secularist elite set out to begin to change that. The traditionalist Democrats could stay in the party but only as long as they surrendered to an unlikely new agenda and that agenda’s leaders.
Many Catholic bishops may have been confused by sudden social changes being shoved through, but there was no reason the bishops had to stay paralyzed by the surprises. It could be argued that most bishops fatally failed to support traditionalist Democratic politicians under radical challenge. All the push was coming was the pro-abortion side with little or no pushback.
These days, bishops are paying the price of surrender. Their foes, smelling fear, turn up their agenda another notch, demanding that Church institutions and other religious people provide for morally objectionable sex and abortion services under Obamacare.
Barack Obama knows these bishops are no threat to him. They may file their lawsuits, but Obama also sees the bishops are fighting as hard as they can to legalize massive illegal immigration, which he’s counting on to give elitist Democrats the additional voting power to do whatever they please to thwart bishops and anyone else, who might dare stand against the party’s immoral ways.
And Pelosi herself mentioned in 2011 that Catholic bishops were asking for her help in passing “comprehensive immigration reform.” Maybe they thought it wasn’t a good idea to deny Communion over a key moral issue when they were pleading for her help on a debatable political issue. Team players and all that, even though Pelosi wants to play for both teams, on each side of the line of scrimmage.
Pelosi said at that time, “The cardinals, the archbishops, and the bishops come to me and say we want you to pass immigration reform, and I said I want you to speak about it from the pulpit.”
Bishops were more than reluctant to preach against Pelosi, but she felt free to tell them what to preach for her political agenda they happened to share.
Arizonans saw the same sort of divided loyalties when the local bishops’ Arizona Catholic Conference went off to pay their respects to the strongly pro-abortion then-Gov. Janet Napolitano, to ask this open-borders Democrat to keep vetoing state bills against illegal immigration. Napolitano was more than glad to oblige.
At least there was no Catholic Communion issue for the non-Catholic Napolitano, although Phoenix Bishop Thomas Olmsted withdrew the welcome mat at Catholic facilities due to her strongly held pro-abortion stand.
Could a person be a national Democratic politician and pro-lifer? Increasingly, the answer from party activists within a few decades became ‘no.’ Well, could a politician be a strong pro-abortionist and Catholic? Bishops across the nation dawdled and averted their gaze.
One still would hope that bishops could find their voice to deny Communion to a politician defending starving children as a solution to overpopulation. But when even greater Episcopal courage would be required today to challenge politicians’ assertive kind of population control in the abortion clinic, bishops often choke up and say they have no intention of searching communicants’ souls.
However, that’s not the issue, unless one means that bishops need to search their own souls because of the moral confusion they’ve encouraged.
Dexter Duggan is an Arizona Catholic journalist.
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