{"id":7021,"date":"2004-07-15T23:17:41","date_gmt":"2004-07-15T23:17:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2004\/07\/from_austin.html"},"modified":"2004-07-15T23:17:41","modified_gmt":"2004-07-15T23:17:41","slug":"from_austin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/07\/from_austin.html","title":{"rendered":"From Austin"},"content":{"rendered":"

A reader alerts me to that bishop’s statement on abortion-rights-supporting politicians and the Eucharist.<\/a><\/p>\n

Anyone who seriously disagrees with the teachings of the church has chosen for their own personal reasons not to be in communion with the church. The real question, it seems to me, is “should a person who is not in communion with the teachings of the church present himself or herself for holy Communion?” That question makes a great deal more sense than placing the bishop, priest or extraordinary minister of holy Communion in the position of refusing the Body and Blood of Christ to someone or having to make a public spectacle of the situation.<\/p>\n

In such a situation, the minister of Communion should first speak privately to the person and exhort them not to present themselves because of scandal. If the person persists and protests, then it could be cause to give them a blessing instead of Communion. All of this needs to be done in a spirit of charity. As I have said before, conversations behind closed doors are ways in which we can help people change their heart and have a clearer understanding of what God expects of us as the followers of Jesus. God never gives up on anyone and we should do our best to help people change their heart.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A reader alerts me to that bishop’s statement on abortion-rights-supporting politicians and the Eucharist. Anyone who seriously disagrees with the teachings of the church has chosen for their own personal reasons not to be in communion with the church. The real question, it seems to me, is “should a person who is not in communion…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7021","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nFrom Austin - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/07\/from_austin.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"From Austin - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"A reader alerts me to that bishop’s statement on abortion-rights-supporting politicians and the Eucharist. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7021","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7021"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7021\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7021"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7021"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7021"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}