Opinion | The Bishops, Biden and the Brave New World – The New York Times

Which points to the second problem that a direct attempt at a communion ban will inevitably be interpreted as a partisan intervention, at a time when the partisan captivity of conservative Christianity, Protestant and Catholic alike, is a serious problem for the witness of the church.

By this I mean that however reasonable the bishops focus on abortion as a pre-eminent issue, in a polarized nation its created a situation where Republicans can seemingly get away with a vast accumulation of un-Catholic acts and policies and simple lies many of them on display in Donald Trumps administration, which was amply staffed with Catholics and be perpetually forgiven because the Democrats support Roe. v. Wade. Which, in turn, makes a pro-life church seem complicit in right-wing evils from the treatment of child migrants to the pardons for soldiers accused of war crimes to the months of mendacity about the 2020 election in ways that undermine its credibility with the many Catholics who understandably did not cast a vote for Trump.

This is, I assume, the view of Pope Francis circle in Rome, which has been distinctly cool to the American bishops potential communion document. Its a view that assumes that the churchs authority needs to be restored before it can be used, and that what Catholicism needs is a kind of strategic patience, in which after so many scandals, so much disillusionment religious faith and pastoral credibility are gradually renewed together.

But the difficulty with that strategy is that there is another set of actors here: the Catholic Democratic politicians themselves, who are not simply holding steady with a kind of moderate pro-choice, safe, legal and rare politics, but rather following their party and the wider drift of liberalism in a more radical direction.

Where once Gov. Mario Cuomo of New York gave anguished philosophical speeches about his personal opposition to abortion, now his son lights the Freedom Tower to celebrate a law protecting third-trimester abortion. Where once the House Democrats included a small but robust pro-life caucus and a lot of conflicted and cross-pressured pro-choice members, now the prevailing attitude is closer to the one expressed by Representative Ted Lieu of California, punctuating a tweet listing his dissents from church teaching: Next time I go to Church, I dare you to deny me Communion.

And where once Joe Biden was a moderate Democrat who supported the Hyde Amendment, restricting federal funding for abortion, now abortion is one of the few issues where Biden felt he needed to swing meaningfully to the left on the campaign trail, abandoning his past positions and becoming more uncompromisingly pro-choice.

Which is where the 14-day rule and the changing shape of embryo science comes in. This hardening of the liberal Catholic position is happening at a time when the scientific capacity to create and exploit human life is rapidly increasing meaning that the debate over whether and how to protect unborn human life will increasingly encompass the laboratory as well as the womb and involve questions of scientific power as much as womens rights.

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Opinion | The Bishops, Biden and the Brave New World - The New York Times