One would love to say that religious matters should stay outside of politics and shouldn’t play a role in someone’s faith, those days are long gone. This country has made getting vaccinated a political issue, watching the NFL is a political issue, right on down to a toy potato. So when the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops took a preliminary vote to withhold communion from politicians who support a woman’s right to choose, they actually chose to create a fierce political divide in the U.S. Catholic church and people do not like it, according to Rev. Edward Beck, a Catholic priest who spoke to Jim Acosta Sunday.

He said it was the final straw for many:

“I had mass this morning, a few of them actually, and unsolicited, I can’t tell you how many people came up to me and were really upset about this.

I mean, across the political spectrum. And basically what they were saying was, you had a former president who checked none of the ‘life issue’ boxes for the Catholic church except that he said he would appoint Supreme Court justices that could overturn Roe v. Wade. And that’s all that seemed to matter.”

Beck said that it is not a priest’s job to stand there and determine whether people are worthy to receive communion.

“I think one of the questions is, are there then other litmus tests about communion? What about other life issues? What about capital punishment? What about immigration? What about the environment? So, are we supposed to stand in a commune line with a checklist, and are we supposed to decide who is qualified to receive or is it just going to be this one issue?”

Beck also reminded viewers that Trump had made fun of Pope Francis (who specifically told the U.S. bishops to not do this) whereas Biden leans strongly on his Catholic faith:

“And then you have Joe Biden, a practicing Catholic, who is pro-choice, although he says he’s personally opposed to abortion, and people are talking about denying him communion. The reception of communion — people see it as really based in hypocrisy. I can’t tell you, some said this is the final straw for them. If the bishops go ahead with that, that’s it for them.”

The lapsed ex-Catholics among us might say that the Catholic church seems to always find a way to be its own worst enemy. This actually could be the final straw in a church whose numbers are plummeting anyway. The ironic part of this is that, just as the U.S. bishops ignored Pope Francis and went ahead with the preliminary vote, many individual priests will ignore the bishops’ decision, further splintering something that is nothing but woodchips at this point. For the less cynical Catholics among us, it must be heartbreaking.

Trump, always dividing, everything he touches dies. It is almost like someone somewhere is pulling levers.

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Peace, y’all
Jason
[email protected] and on Twitter @JasonMiciak