Appeasement

Southern Orders today has a couple of stories concerning a woman who apparently openly discussed her lesbian relationship at her mother’s funeral Mass and was consequently denied Communion by the priest. You can read about it there, or here.

A famous saying in legal circles, originally penned by jurists Baron Cranworth and Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., is "Hard cases make bad law." In essence, this means that when the law and the facts, or equities, of a case are very strongly opposed, the resulting judgments and precedents aren’t going to be satisfactory, and can ultimately call into question the soundness and validity of the judicial system. The original quotation from Baron Cranworth, in the 1842 case of Winterbottom v. Wright, reads as follows: “This is one of those unfortunate cases...in which, it is, no doubt, a hardship upon the plaintiff to be without a remedy but by that consideration we ought not to be influenced. Hard cases, it has frequently been observed, are apt to introduce bad law.” In 1904, Holmes echoed it in Northern Securities vs. United States: “Great cases like hard cases make bad law. For great cases are called great, not by reason of their importance ... but because of some accident of immediate overwhelming interest which appeals to the feelings and distorts the judgment.”

What happened with Barbara Johnson is most definitely a hard case. On the one hand, we have Canon 915, which reads: “Those upon whom the penalty of excommunication or interdict has been imposed or declared, and others who obstinately persist in manifest grave sin, are not to be admitted to holy communion.” There is no wiggle room here, and no exceptions allowed. Unfortunately, American clergy, by and large, simply refuse to abide by it; i.e., they deliberately refuse to do their duty to safeguard the sacrament from profanation and to safeguard the souls of those who receive Communion unworthily (thus engaging in false charity).

On the other hand we have a woman who is attending her mother’s funeral, for Pete’s sake. Picking a fight with her at this point has all the appearance of, and probably is actually, kicking her when she’s down.

So did the priest pick a fight? According to her, he said “I can’t give you Communion because you live with a woman, and in the eyes of the church, that is a sin.” If that’s in fact what he said, it seems a lot more explanation than necessary in a Communion line; perhaps she glossed the statement a bit to put him more in the wrong?

On the other hand, perhaps she was the one who picked a fight. What exactly did she say in her eulogy, and why did she say it? Was her comment about her relationship happenstance, or was it the deliberate casting down of a gauntlet?

In the end, I have to blame the Church for this. Not necessarily the priest, since as I wrote above, we don’t know the whole story—but the Church. Here’s why.

1) First and foremost, the aforementioned persistent, obstinate refusal for at least fifty years on the part of most clergy in most circumstances to enforce Canon 915, even in egregious cases of high-profile pro-abort “Catholic” politicians. The canon is very clear. It is, furthermore, presumably not punitive but corrective, as is excommunication. Yet, in a sense of false charity, out of a fear of hurting peoples’ feelings (and reducing revenues?), clergy just don’t deny people Communion. This leads people, in the long run, a) to believe they may receive Communion as a matter of right, b) to believe that no conditions must be met in order for them to receive Communion, and c) to believe that Catholic moral theology is irrelevant to the Catholic sacramental life, among other things. This scandalizes the faith and makes observant Catholics wonder why they even go to the trouble of trying to live according to Church precepts if the Church is going to teach indifferentism by example and hand out Communion like candy.

2) Second, the mischaracterizationof the Requiem Mass, by a bishop, as a “celebration of life” of the deceased. The purpose of a requiem Mass is to pray for the soul of the deceased, who even at that moment may be undergoing the painful fires of Purgatory. Do we really think so much of ourselves and our merits and our cooperation with grace in our lives that we can just go straight to heaven? Well yes, if we’re certain flavors of Protestant. But news flash: the Catholic Church doesn’t teach that. By celebrating this woman’s life, the Church deprived her of some intercessory prayers that may have been much needed. Where’s the charity in that?

3) Third, an overall pattern of the Church—once again, in the name of false charity and sparing feelings—refusing to judge peoples’ actions. (Nobody can judge the state of someone’s soul except God. But really, are we not to judge the actions of a Ted Bundy or an Adolph Hitler as evil? Really?) In fact—speaking of Hitler—from the Kumbaya years to today (actually, many bishops and priests are still in the Kumbaya age), the Church has embraced appeasement. Let the dissenters have what they want and maybe we’ll avoid internecine war. (And one of the things that dissenters wanted, and got, was the utter destruction, the laying waste, of Catholic catechesis for two generations, thus allowing the breeding of congregations full of people who have adopted modernist ways of thought, becoming silent majority allies of the dissenter-heretics because they don’t know any better.) But the dissenters, like Hitler, never stopped. They’ve won a big battle this week in the Johnson episode.

This third problem is actually the worst. If the Allies had opposed Hitler earlier—at the Rhineland in 1936, or even as late as the Sudetenland in 1938—he could have been defeated, even deposed, with ease. Instead, the Allies waited until the very late to fight him, and in a situation in which there were handicapped (Eastern Europe, with a Polish army ill-equipped to fight the Wehrmacht).

            Likewise, Catholic leaders in America today, in their naiveté, are learning that from the moment that they chose appeasement—chose not to teach the faith and to hold people to it—they ensured that a Poland crisis would someday occur. Today, with the HHS rule and the Johnson Communion-denying debacle, the crisis is upon is. If the Church had done its job properly, an episode like Ms. Johnson’s would never have occurred in the first place.

As a result of this Poland Crisis, the Church will not only be portrayed by the media and a hostile secular culture as being composed of bigots, but composed of hypocritical, perverted bigots. (I bet none of those “pedophile priests” were ever denied Communion, now, were they?) This will undermine whatever moral force the bishops may be able to marshal for the HHS battle—a battle that they already appeared to be weakening on before the Johnson episode. And even in this Communion uproar, the bishop’s letter shows that he caved (by stating that the priest was wrong, Canon 915 is wrong, and the characterization of a funeral Mass as a requiem is wrong). So what else is wrong, Your Excellency? Transubstantiation? The Incarnation? The existence of God? Where, pray tell, does it stop?

Folks, anyone may receive Communion in a Catholic Church. Anyone in the world. All you have to do to qualify is to choose to be Catholic and to try your best to live a Catholic life (which includes things such as regular Confession). It’s up to each individual whether or not to do that. As has been said over and over and over again, the Church doesn’t excommunicate people; people excommunicate themselves. What I’m sick of is bishops and priests apologizing to someone for his (or in this case her) decision not to qualify. As I continue to behold Church leaders in America refusing to teach or to defend the faith, I’m beginning, more and more, to ponder Luke 7:19: “And John [the Baptist] called to him two of his disciples, and sent them to Jesus, saying: Art thou he that art to come; or look we for another?”

            What’s it going to take?