{"id":7117,"date":"2004-06-22T10:09:18","date_gmt":"2004-06-22T10:09:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2004\/06\/last_bit_o_grist.html"},"modified":"2004-06-22T10:09:18","modified_gmt":"2004-06-22T10:09:18","slug":"last_bit_o_grist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/06\/last_bit_o_grist.html","title":{"rendered":"Last bit o’ grist"},"content":{"rendered":"

From Commonweal, Frans Jozef van Beeck, SJ on denying Communion to pro-abortion politicians<\/a><\/p>\n

In this situation, where do I stand? As a priest-theologian, I do not worship the church. Rather, I suffer with it, as family members do with family. Nor am I a political agent. I rarely indicate my views on current issues. Blam\u00ading is as old as the Garden of Eden, and the Christian tradition rejects it. Still, Archbishop Burke\u2019s stand, courageous as it may seem, raises so many doubts about the fit between the great tradition and North Amer\u00adi\u00adcan Catholicity that I have resolved to do some theology in public: I ar\u00adgue that withholding sacraments from Catholic politicians is too se\u00advere a penalty. Why? First, it draws per\u00adilously close to selective condemnation; public identification of sinners is not a priestly ministry. (Ignatius Loyola is said to have called a Jes\u00aduit on the carpet for criticizing the current pope\u2019s sins from the pulpit; Ignatius told him that we do not publicly discuss the sins of in\u00addividuals.) Second, it fails in mercy toward a wounded world steeped in sin\u2014but not degenerate down to its root. Third, for Catholics, human life is not the ul\u00adti\u00admate norm. Savage as abortion on demand is, it has an upside: some fifteen years after Roe v. Wade I found myself telling students that know\u00ading they were wanted at birth was a grace; and three years ago, in my hearing, a youngish religious volunteered that a physician had \u201ccautioned\u201d his mother while she was pregnant. Talk about thank\u00adful\u00adness for the given gift of life!<\/p>\n

One can\u2019t blame the bishops for thinking that they should at least be drawing the line somewhere. Still, I suspect that some may be trying to recoup their authority. If that is the case, I fear they will only be shrugged off further. <\/p>\n

This is all the more likely when someone like Archbishop Burke appears to overlook the canonical practice of restrictive application of laws imposing pen\u00adal\u00adties and limiting freedoms, and the moral practice of distinguishing between formal and merely material cooperation. Accepting evil is not the same thing as approving of it\u2014let alone promoting it. Even logically, being prochoice is not identical with being proabortion. Neither is cowardice nor dodg\u00ading proof of malice, and hence, not mortally sinful. I know of no Catholic politicians who have purposely sought to positively advance abor\u00adtion; most are op\u00ad\u00adposed to it \u201cpersonally\u201d\u2014a bad choice of words. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From Commonweal, Frans Jozef van Beeck, SJ on denying Communion to pro-abortion politicians In this situation, where do I stand? As a priest-theologian, I do not worship the church. Rather, I suffer with it, as family members do with family. Nor am I a political agent. I rarely indicate my views on current issues. Blam\u00ading…<\/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-7117","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nLast bit o' grist - 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\/06\/last_bit_o_grist.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Last bit o' grist - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"From Commonweal, Frans Jozef van Beeck, SJ on denying Communion to pro-abortion politicians In this situation, where do I stand? As a priest-theologian, I do not worship the church. Rather, I suffer with it, as family members do with family. Nor am I a political agent. I rarely indicate my views on current issues. 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As a priest-theologian, I do not worship the church. Rather, I suffer with it, as family members do with family. Nor am I a political agent. I rarely indicate my views on current issues. 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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\/7117","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=7117"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7117\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7117"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7117"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7117"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}