Why Is President Biden Being Denied Communion?

JOHN ALLEN, CNN SENIOR VATICAN ANALYST: The bishops have been confronted for a long time with this question of what to do about public figures who are Catholic and who do not uphold church teaching on certain key points. And, by far, the most controversial of those points tends to be the abortion issue. This came up in 2004, for instance, when John Kerry, another Catholic Democrat, was the nominee for president of the United States. And, at that time, there was a debate within the Bishops Conference about whether or not Kerry and other pro-choice Catholic politicians should be denied communion, never really resolved then. And that brings us to the current moment. Now, there are a couple of other factors here, however. One is that, for the last year or so, because of the COVID pandemic, it has been very difficult for Catholics to attend mass often. That is the Sunday worship service in which the Eucharist, the sacrament in which the church teaches you are receiving the body and blood of Jesus Christ is kind of the signature moment. That hasn’t happened on a fairly wide scale. And therefore, mass attendance has gone down. Another is that polls are now showing that a wide swath of the American Catholic population, according to some polls, almost as many as two-thirds of the Catholics in the United States, no longer believe what the church teaches about the eucharist, that is that this is really the body and blood of Christ. And so, there are a lot of bishops who have a concern not merely about politicians, but about sort of the attachment to the sacrament in general. And so, this debate in the bishops’ conference was about whether the bishops should move forward with a teaching document on the eucharist. Now, that document has a section that will have to do with rules for a worthy reception of the eucharist, which could have implications for President Biden and others. But frankly, Bianna, I think there are a lot of bishops who decided to vote for this document not because they necessarily want to turn away the president of the United States in a communion line, but because they have this deeper pastoral concern about trying to foster a solid faith in this central sacrament and central teaching of the church. We won’t really know exactly what the bishops’ position is going on be on President Biden and other Catholic politicians, probably until next November. Because this was just a vote to have a document. We haven’t actually seen it yet. We need to see the text before we know what those implications are.