Topic: CNSNews.com
For months, the uber-Catholics at CNSNews.com have been attacking President Biden for not being Catholic enough, with an emphasis on building a narrative aimed at encouraging Catholic bishops to deny him and other Catholic politicians it has deemed insufficiently Catholic -- such as Nancy Pelosi -- Communion at church in a very public way. That has continued:
- Managing editor Michael W. Chapman touted in a May 3 article: "In a May 1 pastoral letter on the moral evil of abortion, Archbishop Salvatore J. Cordileone of San Francisco explains why Catholic politicians (and other public Catholics) who support abortion must not receive Holy Communion and why they must stop pretending that advocating for abortion is compatible with the Catholic faith."
- In a May 18 column, anti-abrtion activist Judie Brown cheered the idea of bishops denying Biden Communion, huffing that "seeing their bishops debate whether or not a Catholic public official like Biden or Pelosi should be denied the body of Christ because they support this killing is an absurdity. And it creates confusion everywhere." Brown then ranted: "Pelosi, Biden, and others have pandered to evil and insulted the body of Christ for many years. Do the bishops and the Vatican really need to study this, or are they obligated to Christ Himself to say once and for all, 'Choose! Unity or division, Christ or Satan!'?"
- Chapman highlighted in a June 1 article how another bishop "largely denounced President Biden's budget proposal for excluding the pro-life Hyde Amendment, stating that 'Congress must reject the Administration’s proposal to subsidize the deaths of unborn children.'"
- Dishonest right-wing Catholic Bill Donohue used a June 4 column to huff that it was "character assassination" when a liberal Catholic publication argued that bishops desperate to publicly rebuke Biden are trying to create a "MAGA church" and are "in the pockets of wealthy donors pushing a political agenda." Three days later, Donohue contributed a column that purported to list "Biden's 30+ Departures From Catholicism Thus Far."
- An anonymously written June 14 article quoted a bishop who issued s statement "in which he cites President Joe Biden for promoting evils, including the abortion of unborn babies, the marriage of people of the same sex and people identifying as the opposite sex of the one they are biologically," adding that "the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, as planned, should discuss at their virtual meeting this week why Catholics who advocate abortion cannot receive communion."
- An anonymously written June 18 article found a bishop who said that Biden's "calling abortion a 'right' and trying to abolish the Hyde Amendment so taxpayers must pay for it is 'the most aggressive thing we’ve ever seen in terms of this attack on life when it’s most innocent.'"
In a May 12 article, Chapman complained that CNS' anti-Biden goal of denying him Communion was being resisted by the Vatican:
As U.S. Catholic bishops prepare for a June meeting on how to address the scandal of pro-abortion Catholic politicians receiving Holy Communion, the Vatican's doctrinal office has sent a letter to the bishops essentially urging them to slow down, delay, take more time to debate and communicate before formulating a policy on the issue.
Cardinal Luis Ladaria, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the office that defends official Catholic teaching, said in a May 7 letter to the bishops that when this topic was discussed in 2019-2020, "the formulation of a national policy was suggested ... only if this would help the bishops to maintain unity."
"This Congregation notes that such a policy" today, "given its possibly contentious nature, could have the opposite effect and become a source of discord rather than unity within the episcopate and the larger Church in the United States."
[...]
In the United States, some of the most prominent Catholic politicians who support abortion are well known and their anti-life position has been well-documented for decades.
CNS started building up to that meeting of Bishops. A June 18 article by Melanie Arter featured how Biden said "he doesn’t think the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops will deny him Communion based on his support for abortion," and a June 22 column by Pat Buchanan hyped bishops' alleged "alarm that the public religious practice of President Joe Biden is conveying a heretical message to the faithful and the nation."
But when that meeting of bishops resulted in them declining to establish a national policy of withholding Communion from Biden and other Catholic politicians, CNS ... reported nothing. It wasn't until July 1 -- several days after the bishops' meeting -- that the outcome was first mentioned on the CNS website, and that was in a column by Donohue complaining that a newspaper criticized the bishops for even considering such drastic action.
This was followed by a July 6 column by Brown complaining that "Catholic bishops, for the most part, seem to be unfamiliar with the difference between profaning the body of Christ in the Eucharist and being coherent in a policy that defends and protects Him from sacrilege." Then, a July 8 column by Stephen Kokx ranted:
How much do Catholic bishops in the United States care about unborn babies? Or, for that matter, infallible church teaching on the Eucharist? By the looks of it, not that much.
[...]
It would’ve been a glorious moment in Church history — perhaps something even akin to St. Ambrose rebuking Emperor Theodosius in the 4th century — had the bishops taken a stand and boldly defended Catholic doctrine at their June meeting. Instead, they caved to media and Vatican pressure and are now complicit in the continued profanation of the Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity of Jesus Christ. May God have mercy on their souls.
Kokx didn't explain why it's a bad thing for Catholic bishops to be influenced by "Vatican pressure." That's the head of the Catholic church, after all.
CNS has yet to devote a "news" article to the bishops' decision.
