Rosa DeLauro grew up in an Italian Catholic household in New Haven and is the proud product of a Catholic education from grade school through college.
Joe Courtney was educated by Dominican nuns at St. Timothy’s Middle School before moving on to Northwest Catholic High School in West Hartford.
And John Larson attended St. Rose grammar school in East Hartford, where the sisters of Notre Dame were “pretty strict and tough, but they were also incredibly compassionate and focused on the Bible.”
All three members of Congress from Connecticut found themselves publicly tangling with the U.S. Catholic Bishops over whether a Democratic president who supports abortion rights can receive Holy Communion.
A “statement of principles” organized by DeLauro and endorsed by Larson, Courtney and 57 other Catholic Democrats in the House of Representatives calls on the bishops to avoid “weaponizing” the sacrament of the Eucharist.
It came in response to a recent push by conservative bishops to create a new policy that could lead to the denial of Communion to President Joe Biden because he backs legalized abortion.
Following days of debate and criticism, the conference of bishops shifted away from a looming confrontation with Biden and other Catholic politicians over abortion. The group released a Q&A that makes no mention of Biden and clarifies that there will continue to be no national policy on withholding Communion from politicians.
Still, the bishops’ initial statement and the response from Catholic critics illustrates the lingering divide within the church between conservatives and liberals over how to handle Catholic politicians who back policies the church views a morally wrong.
The Eucharist, or Holy Communion, is one of the church’s most sacred rituals. It is not “a prize for the perfect but a powerful medicine and nourishment for the weak,” the lawmakers said in their statement.
But Peter Wolfgang, the executive director of the Family Institute of Connecticut, which opposes abortion, said the bishops are right to respond to Catholic politicians who flout church teachings on abortion. “After 48 years of legal abortion, we have now arrived at the point where Rosa DeLauro and her friends think they can threaten and bully the church in the public square, and the bishops that have to respond to that,” he said.
A polarizing issue for Catholics
The debate over whether politicians who support legalized abortion ought to receive Communion is a return of the “wafer wars,” which have erupted several times over the past 40 years, said Mark Silk, professor of religion and public life at Trinity College in Hartford.
In a 1984 speech at the University of Notre Dame, former New York Gov. Mario Cuomo laid out a doctrine for Catholic politicians who support access to abortion, explaining that while he was “personally opposed” to the procedure, he did not want to make it illegal in the U.S.
“That’s been the standard talking point for every pro-abortion Catholic politician ever since,” Wolfgang said.
Catholics, like the electorate in general, are deeply polarized on the issue of abortion. According to a 2019 Pew Research Center poll, a slim majority — 56% — of Catholics say abortion should be legal in most cases. But, as Michael Sean Winters, a Connecticut-based journalist who covers politics and the Catholic Church for the National Catholic Reporter, noted, “we don’t take polls in the Catholic Church.”
Earlier this month, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, meeting remotely, voted to draft a document on “the beauty and the power of the Eucharist.” Although the policy is not expected until November, the move sets up a potential conflict with Biden, the nation’s second Catholic president.
David Elliott, a spokesman for the Hartford Archdiocese, said the aim was never to pick a fight with Biden, who regularly attends Mass and is the most openly devout president since Jimmy Carter.
Rather, the bishops are seeking to clarify the importance of Communion and reinvigorate the church at a time when Mass attendance is waning and many churches have merged or closed.
“It is the bishops’ perspective that the revitalization of the church will be directly tied into the Eucharist in order to help people understand exactly what is going on when people receive Communion, in order to help them prepare for it,” Elliott said.
Hartford Archbishop Leonard Blair, who is aligned with the conservative bishops, supported the measure. Elliott said he is not aware of any priests within the Hartford archdiocese denying a politician Communion.
The goal, Elliott said, is not to make the Eucharist less accessible. But, he added, “there’s criteria that has to be met. It’s the job of the person receiving Communion to do that self-assessment and determine their worthiness that particular Sunday.”
A place for everyone?
The bishops’ statement reflects a growing conflict between conservative Catholics and liberals such as the Connecticut members of Congress, who share Pope Francis’ focus on immigration, economic inequality and environmental justice.
“I’m a Pope Francis guy,” declared Courtney, a Democrat who represents Connecticut’s 2nd District, which covers the eastern half of the state.
Courtney recalled the pride he felt in hearing Francis speak at The Catholic University of America in 2015.
“He was very animated when he addressed issues that he tied to his Catholicism, whether it was climate change, immigration or violence in general,” Courtney said. “He did talk about a pro-life agenda, which included abolition of capitol punishment.”
The statement of principles signed by Courtney and other Catholic Democrats in Congress invokes Francis. The pope, the lawmakers said, “extols that clergy must act as facilitators of grace, not arbiters, because ‘the Church is not a tollhouse; it is the house of the Father, where there is a place for everyone, with all their problems.'”
“As legislators, we, too, are charged with being facilitators of the Constitution which guarantees religious freedom for all Americans. In doing so, we guarantee our right to live our own lives as Catholics but also foster an America with a rich diversity of faiths,” the statement says.
In a letter last month, a top lieutenant to Francis warned the U.S. bishops that setting a policy on Communion for politicians could become a source of discord.
“Francis is not a ‘cultural warrior,'” said Trinity’s Silk. “On the contrary, he’s more interested in helping the poor than he is in fighting wars about abortion.”
Courtney said Francis gets it right. “The church is not monolithic. There’s a wide range of issues that animate Catholics,” he said. “To pick and choose which ones are going to be tied to a person’s participation in the holiest of sacraments is a slippery slope.”
The U.S. bishops’ stance is unprecedented, said Winters, the National Catholic Reporter journalist. “I totally understand why members of Congress were upset,” he said. “No one in the world does this. … Pope John Paul II gave Communion to the pro-choice Communist mayor of Rome; he gave Communion to Tony Blair when Tony Blair wasn’t even a Catholic.”
Yet the lawmakers’ statement waded a bit too far into theology, Winters said. “In telling the bishops, ‘You stay in your lane. Don’t come into our lane,’ you can’t then go into the bishops’ lane,” he said.
Drawing a line on abortion
Rep. Larson said the aim wasn’t to tell the bishops how to run the church. “The church is entitled to do what it wants … and the bishops are entitled to respond however they desire,” he said. “Our responsibility is to speak up for the people we represent.”
Larson was one of eight children who grew up in public housing in East Hartford, where it wasn’t uncommon for people to hang two pictures on the wall: one of Jesus and one of JFK.
“President Kennedy said he believed that [in] America, the separation of church and state is absolute,” Larson said. “No Catholic prelate would tell him what to do. I think Kennedy go it right.”
Larson said he questions why the bishops have drawn a line on abortion while ignoring a politician’s stance on other issues highlighted by Francis.
“There’s not a test on other important issues, like the death penalty,” said Larson, whose district includes Hartford and its suburbs. “It comes back to the old question: What would Jesus do?
“When you talk about immigration, and you look at a number of other issues out there and you look at the overall mission of the church, there are far more that we share than we don’t,” Larson said.
The announcement that there will be no national policy on withholding Communion from politicians may bring relief to some Mass-attending Catholic elected officials who support abortion rights.
But local bishops already have the authority to decide who can receive the church’s sacraments. Cardinal Wilton Gregory, who presides over the Washington, D.C., archdiocese, has already stated that he has no intention of denying Biden Communion.
The Q&A posted by the conference of bishops says the intent was to “present a clear understanding of the church’s teachings to bring heightened awareness among the faithful of how the Eucharist can transform our lives and bring us closer to our creator and the life he wants for us” — not to establish a new policy barring politicians who support abortion rights from receiving communion.
For his part, Biden declined to delve too deep into what he deemed a private matter. Asked about it recently, the president said, “I don’t think that’s going to happen.”
Winters said the issue isn’t about abortion. “It’s about politics. And if the gospel of Jesus Christ and an affiliation with the Catholic Church cannot be born in a liberal heart or a conservative heart, then we’ve misunderstood it for 2,000 years.”
