Canon 915: Withdrawal of Communion, Protecting the Sacrament, and Avoiding Public Scandal

Patrick Brennan's reminder that the canon law rules regarding admission to communion concern the sacramental life of the Church is important. At the same time, however, the question cannot be separated entirely from what an individual's "performance in a legislative or judicial role should be." Canon 915 is, as Professor Brennan notes, designed "to protect the ecclesial life of the whole Catholic communion." That includes the responsibility of the bishop as pastor of the diocese to be concerned about the salvation of the soul of the person who asks for communion as well as the souls of the entire congregation.

Thus, while Canon 916 directs the individual to ascertain his or her own suitability for the Eucharist as a general matter, Canon 915 directs affirmative withholding of communion in certain circumstances. The Church places original responsibility on each individual, generally assumes good faith on the part of congregants, and, thus, ordinarily offers communion to all who come to the altar at Mass. The Church, however, always has retained and sometimes has exercised the power and obligation to deny admission to Holy Communion when scandal to the faithful would occur because of the public character of the Eucharist and the notoriety of the supplicant.

In the case of the pro-abortion politician, the danger of scandal to the faithful is manifested precisely from his or her public behavior. Thus, the public witness of the Church for life, the public repudiation of a pro-abortion politicians of the Church's witness, and the rules for admission to the Eucharist are interwined. The political effect of withholding of communion from politicians who break communion with the Church, whether segregationists in the 1950s or pro-abortion politicians today, is, to be sure, not the primary or animating purpose of the ecclesial action, but neither is it unintended or incidental, as it bears on the avoidance of scandal and the Church's public witness. (Although I may address it in a future posting, I deliberately have limited this posting to the question of the Catholic politician rather than the Catholic judge, as the judicial role raises further complications.)

Below I set forth an excerpt from an article that I wrote with my University of St. Thomas colleague, Charles Reid, that was published last fall in the Catholic Lawyer. [Please note that this is only an excerpt of a larger work, that addresses other elements of this question, and that I have omitted the footnotes. The full article may be accessed at this link

* * *
Excerpt: Gregory C. Sisk & Charles J. Reid, Jr., Abortion, Bishops, Eucharist, and Politicians: A Question of Communion, 43 Catholic Lawyer 255, 84-87 (2004):

"Canon 915 of the Code of Canon Law, which states the bases for denial of admission to Holy Communion, sets forth four signals of the nature of the sin justifying pastoral action: (1) obstinacy, (2) persistence (sometimes translated as “perseverance”), (3) manifestness, and (4) gravity.

First, the sin is obstinate if the person, despite the objective wrongfulness of the proposed conduct through the Church’s teaching or the intrinsically evil nature of the act, nonetheless is adamant in carrying through with the deed. Thus, as discussed above, pastoral teaching and counseling ought to precede any resort to denial of communion, so as to ensure that the person involved has been instructed in the Church’s unswerving solicitude for innocent human life and how this relates most forcefully to legal protection of the unborn. If, however, the person refuses or is unaffected by pastoral counseling, the inherent evil of abortion leaves no room for the plea of ignorance as to the wrongfulness of the destruction of the unborn. In any event, it can hardly be doubted that the Church’s teaching on this issue has been clearly and regularly stated, leaving no one confused as to where the Church stands.

Second, a person persists or perseveres in sin when the wrongful act is part of a pattern of behavior, that is, it “endures in time.” With respect to a politician, then, the question is not one of maintaining some type of “score-card” or evaluating each individual legislative vote on abortion in isolation. Rather, the question is whether the politician has welded in public life an unbroken chain of support for abortion rights and opposition to measures to restrict abortion on demand. Still, a politician may not excuse a consistent “pro-choice” voting record by protesting that the right to abortion is constitutionally fixed and thus he or she is a helpless spectator on the matter. As Pope John Paul II wrote in his Encyclical Evangelium Vitae: “[W]hen it is not possible to overturn or completely abrogate a pro-abortion law, an elected official, whose absolute personal opposition to procured abortion was well known, could licitly support proposals aimed at limiting the harm done by such a law and lessening its negative consequences at the level of general opinion and public morality.”

Third, the sin must be manifest before withdrawal of communion is directed. The word “manifest” could either be read to modify the gravity of the sin, that is, meaning that the gravity of the sin must be obvious, as having reference to the public nature of the sin, or both. To the extent that it is an adjective attaching to the gravity of the sin, the manifest evil of abortion, and the legal regime that licenses it, has already been discussed in the first point above. To the extent that it may be argued that it is a qualifier as applied to this situation, that is, that the wrongness of supporting abortion rights is different in kind from the evil of directly procuring an abortion, that point is discussed next. In the context of politicians and abortion, the word “manifest”—having a plain meaning consistent with scriptural use of being visible and evident—implicates the public nature of political advocacy or political action. As Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger wrote to the American bishops, a politician’s cooperation with this evil is made manifest by “consistently campaigning and voting for permissive abortion and euthanasia laws.”

Indeed, it is that very public aspect of a Catholic politician’s rejection of fundamental Church teaching that so poignantly creates scandal for the faithful. As the Pontifical Council for Legislative Texts declared, “the reception of the Body of Christ when one is publicly unworthy constitutes an objective harm to the ecclesial communion; it is a behavior that affects the rights of the Church and of all the faithful to live in accord with the exigencies of that communion.”

Fourth, the sin must be grave, that is, a weighty matter and not a small step aside from the narrow way of salvation. It cannot be gainsaid, and indeed canon law is emphatic on this point, that procuring an abortion is a matter of grave sin. Is a political act that facilitates a deluge of abortions of the same kind and degree? Certainly, it cannot be doubted that for the politician who effectively if not explicitly advocates abortion rights as a positive social good, welcoming endorsements from entities that are directly involved in performing abortions, the advocacy and the manifestly grave evil that is certified are closely tethered together. For a politician who professes reluctance and hesitation about abortion rights, but has not yet fully embraced the mission of protecting innocent human life, the pertinent question will be the sincerity of expressed concerns, as manifested by clear public statements and concrete actions that work against the culture of death, as well as evidence of a continual progression toward more affirmative support for unborn life.

In sum, when a public official uses political power to facilitate the annihilation of the unborn, or deliberately and calculatedly refuses to exercise governmental authority to prevent it, the argument that Church discipline should attach is a quite plausible, if not ineluctable, interpretation of canon law. Indeed, if each individual is free to claim Catholic affiliation when comfortable or advantageous, while assuming a license to emphatically and publicly reject Catholic teaching when expedient, without any fear of rebuke or discipline, then the witness of the Church to the larger society on matters of fundamental human rights could be undone."

Greg Sisk