The Politics of Holy Communion

When John F. Kennedy ran for President of the United States in 1960, he had to persuade a lot of non-Catholics that he was a loyal enough American to be President in spite of his own Catholic heritage. He accomplished the task so well that he not only got himself elected; he supposedly laid to rest "the Catholic issue" in American politics permanently.

Well, maybe not. Some in the American Catholic hierarchy, most notably Cardinal McCarrick of the Washington Archdiocese, are now in the process of exhuming the coffin. Specifically, they are threatening to withhold communion from Catholic legislators who do not vote the church's way on issues before them --- especially on issues related to abortion. And so, as Catholic Senator John Kerry continues his own run for the Presidency, he faces a far more insidious version of "the Catholic issue" than the one with which his predecessor had to deal: this time, the issue is subversion of the Constitution by leaders in his own church.

Fortunately, at least for those of us who still think that the First Amendment is the best guide to living out our faith in a pluralistic society, our country is now getting some important support from Catholic legislators themselves. Upwards of fifty in the Congress have already challenged publically their church leaders' high-handed attempts to coerce consent to church doctrine through manipulating the political process. Hopefully, more and more state and local Catholics will join with them, or else the rule by clerics that we are decrying nowadays in Saudi Arabia and Iran could be here before we can even get our e-mails off to the Pope to unpack. For if Catholic bishops and priests can't pull off the power grab just by themselves, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and Franklin Graham will be more than eager to lend their support to the cause.

It is little short of sickening to contemplate priests refusing to serve communion to the politically incorrect while they are flipping the wafers onto the tongues of their pedophile brothers in the order. But it is downright blasphemous to contemplate their withholding Christ himself from those who, for whatever reason, have gotten themselves to Christ's table in the hope of receiving Him there. For these same priests are teaching the faithful that Christ is indeed bodily present in the elements of the bread and wine. On the ground of this same sacred teaching, withholding these elements is tantamount to shoving the Lord himself away from His own table. Archbishop McCarrick shouldn't need another 95 theses nailed to his cathedral's front door in order to get this.

We Protestants, though, are by no means clean on this issue. A number of traditionalists, clearly with too much time on their hands, have been doing some tinkering of their own around the communion table, to the effect that we should now prescribe the attainment of "worthiness" as a condition for coming to it. Or if not worthiness, at least baptism. By contrast, John Wesley thought of the sacrament itself as having converting power: partake of it and then you just might get the idea that new life in Christ is a life better than any you could carve out on your own. Methodists who really want to be more traditional than they think our church now is should begin right here.

If you have been around long enough as a Methodist yourself, you probably know by heart the Wesleyan words of invitation to the communion table: "Ye that do truly and earnestly repent of your sins, and are in love and charity with your neighbors, and intend to lead a new life, following the commandments of God and walking henceforth in his holy ways, draw near with faith…" Nothing that we've done to make communion liturgies more worshipper-friendly comes even close to capturing the power of these particular words.

But the words are of invitation, not of pre-condition, and certainly not of command. Just like the words of Genesis 1: "Be fruitful and increase." Most of the uncharitable pronouncements about abortion and homosexuality rampant in our churches today derive from deforming this divine invitation into a divine imperative, making the multiplication of offspring the sole validation of sexual behavior. If you are trying to out-populate the original inhabitants of territory you want for your own, this may not be a bad political strategy, but it makes for very bad theology under any conditions. Just as does deforming Wesley's vision of what will happen as a result of coming to communion into a set of virtues you must acquire before you get there.