What do President Joe Biden and ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick share in common? According to the organizer of a recent conference on Biden's Catholicism, the two men have been "abandoned" by the church's pastors for not having been barred from Communion.
The Vatican's McCarrick report, which chronicled his decades of abuse of minors and seminarians and was released last fall, illustrates "what happens when the church fails to be church by preferring instead to be, as a practical matter, to be a bureaucracy," said Villanova University professor of law Patrick McKinley Brennan on April 23.
"What McCarrick needed was callously denied," he said, going on to argue by comparison that Biden's support for legal abortion demands that "the church's pastors ... show the truth" and deny the president Communion.
Brennan was the convener of "Taking Measure of the 'Biden Effect': American Catholics and the President," a virtual conference hosted by the Charles Widger School of Law at Villanova University.
The conference comes nearly three months after the U.S. bishops disbanded a controversial working group to address issues stemming from Biden's Catholicism and areas in which he differs from church teaching on public policy. A proposal to produce a teaching document on "Eucharistic coherence or consistency" was sent to the U.S. bishops' Committee on Doctrine, with some bishops publicly advocating for Biden to be barred from receiving Communion.
The Villanova gathering added to that intensifying debate within the U.S. church and elevated a number of voices of those sympathetic to denying the president Communion. Biden's two local bishops in Washington, D.C., and Wilmington, Delaware, however, have said they would not deny him Communion in their respective dioceses, and Pope Francis has signaled an eagerness to find ways to collaborate with the Biden administration.
Brennan voiced frustration during the conference that the media has sought to portray the pope as an ally of Biden, citing Francis' recent participation in Biden's Earth Day climate summit last week and zeroing in on a tweet from the pope's official Twitter account last December wherein he used the phrase "build back better," which was a Biden campaign slogan.
"The pope, in quoting candidate Biden's mantra, created the impression — whether he intended it or not, I cannot say — that he supported the candidate," Brennan said.
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