Appeasement, Part III

The fight over Fr. Marcel Guarnizo's denial of communion to self-avowed Buddhist and lesbian activist Barbara Johnson, and the archdioce's subsequent (consequent?) actions of placing him on administrative leave and suspending his faculties continues. (You can read my earlier coverage here and here.) One of the more interesting turns is a mutual flame war between  George Neumayr, a contributing editor to The American Spectator, and  Edward Peters, a canon lawyer who blogs on  . . . well, canon law.


Peters, who claims that he has often called in strong terms for bishops to apply Canon 915 and deny Communion to those who meet its conditions (such as pro-abort politicians), has argued that Johnson doesn't fall under that canon, or at the very least, that Fr. Guarnizo was in no position to reach the conclusion that she did. He further argues that Neumayr is engaging in unwarranted invective towards Cardinal Wuerl. I'm not going to provide links to all of Peters's posts on the issue since there are so many; simply take a look at his dozen or so most recent entries here as of this date (i.e., 3 April 2012) and you'll see them.


Normally I'm a stickler for understanding and applying the close wording of the law--canonical, constitutional, administrative, statutory, judicial, you name it. My great complaint with the "spirit of Vatican II" is that it's a code-word for a deliberate abrogation, an open flouting, of the text of that council as well as all of the councils that preceded it, leading to a "Catholicism" that is both Gnostic and Montanist. (Coincidentally, Montanists were sometimes known to refer to themselves as spiritales or "spiritual people.")


Furthermore, I'm aware that my patron saint, Thomas More, pointed out (at least in A Man for All Seasons) that "I give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake." (The actual quotation from Roper's biography is "[T]his one thing I assure thee on my faith, that if the parties will at my hand call for justice, then were it my father stood on the one side and the devil on the other side (his cause being good) the devil should have right.")


Yet furthermore, I do think that Peters has at least a theoretical point (and perhaps Canon 212 § 3) on his side regarding the danger of taking a disrespectful tone towards clergy.


But (you knew there was a "but" coming, right?) it is also true that the law, if applied too rigorously, can sometimes lead to injustice, and Peters doesn't seem to get that. Perhaps in canon law, such a maxim doesn't exist, but it does in the legal systems I'm most conversant with, and I believe that the reasoning behind the maxim applies in the current instance. let's take a look at the facts, as Peters exhorts us to do--at least as we know them.


Fact # 1: Johnson is a self-identified Buddhist lesbian.


Fact # 2: Father Guarnizo denied her Communion.


Fact # 3. The vicar general of the archdiocese apologized to Johnson, and in the course of doing so mischaracterized the nature of a requiem Mass.


Fact # 4: Father Guarnizo was placed on administrative leave and his faculties removed pending an investigation.


I may be wrong, but for some reason I suspect that if the shoe were on the other foot, the modernists out there wouldn't give the same kind of close legal analysis to the issue that Peters has in defense of an affronted orthodox Catholic in a state of grace. In fact, I wonder if the authorities have conducted such an analysis of Fr. Guarnizo's rights, or have even attempted to do so.


In short: Canon 915 may give Johnson the legal right to receive Communion, but if so, the result--together with the reaction of the archdiocese, including the cardinal's deafening silence--is, at least on the face of it, absurd as well as unjust. And the law, at least the law that I have most thoroughly studied, should never be taken so far as to lead to such an absurd and unjust result as this.


I'll close with a quotation and a hypothetical. Peters states that "personal disclosure of a sin, even an unrepented grave sin, to a priest does not allow him to withhold holy Communion from that person if s/he approaches for it publicly." So if, just before Mass, I tell a priest that I have desecrated consecrated Hosts in televised Black Masses, and that I will do so again with the Host he gives me at Communion today, he can't withhold it from me under 915? (Perhaps there's another canon that would apply to such a situation as this, but stick to 915 for the moment. Right now I'm just trying to see if there is ever a 915 reason for a priest to deny Communion based on a one-off revelation to him just before Mass.)


Sorry, Mr. Peters, I think you're in the wrong wrong on this one.