Today, Explained - Bish, don't kill my vibe

Episode Date: June 24, 2021

Catholic bishops want to deny President Biden communion, even though Pope Francis thinks that's a terrible idea. The Atlantic's Emma Green explains. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained. Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit Superstore.ca to get started. I was raised Catholic, which meant that every Sunday, before we could eat a big old lunch, we'd have to go to St. Joseph's Parish on Old Kingston Road for Mass. We'd sit through Mass hungry, but towards the end of the service, you'd forget how much you wanted that lunch because you had to rise from your pew, get in a long line with everyone else at church to go up and get a very small bite to eat. It's a thin little wafer of a bread-like substance next to zero flavor.

That small, unremarkable snack, along with a sip of wine if you were old enough, is actually the most important part of the Mass, the main event. Therefore, as we celebrate the memorial of his death and resurrection, we offer you, Lord, the bread of life and the chalice of salvation. I realize now, we called it a whole heap of things, from the bread, to communion, the Eucharist, the host, all the way up to the body of Christ. In retrospect, that sounds a little cannibalistic, but by eating the host and taking a sip of wine, you were consuming the flesh and blood of Jesus Christ. It's called transubstantiation. You were channeling the moment he died for you on the cross and bringing him into your body. There's really nothing more important

in the practice of Catholicism. And that's why it's such a big deal that a bunch of Catholic bishops are trying to deny President Joe Biden, maybe the second most famous Catholic on the planet, this blessed sacrament. That's right. So Joe Biden has been an out front Catholic for his entire political life. Emma Green's been covering the story for The Atlantic. He's famous for stopping in at different masses on the campaign trail. And for me, my religion is just an enormous sense of solace. I go to mass and I say the rosary. I find it to be incredibly comforting. He's a pretty regular attender when he's in D.C., both when he was vice president and now

that he's president. I began thinking about a hymn that means a lot to me and my family, particularly my deceased son, Beau. And he's someone who talks really openly about how important it is for him to have been raised as a Catholic and for him to have that Catholic faith to hold on to, especially through moments of tragedy in his life. Hopefully this hymn gives you solace as well. It goes like this. And he will raise you up on eagle's wings, bear you on the breath of dawn, and make you to sign like the sun and hold you in the palm of his hand. So, you know, this is a really big moment

that we have this conflict that's now been set up between certain members of the Catholic hierarchy, certain bishops, who have basically said, this really famous Catholic, the president of the United States, the second ever Catholic president in history in America. After John F. Kennedy. After JFK, that's right. I am not the Catholic candidate for president. I am the Democratic Party's candidate for president, who happens also to be a Catholic. That we think that potentially it's not appropriate for him to be receiving communion because of his stances on abortion. So for Biden specifically, this got tipped off around Inauguration Day. There was a letter that got circulated from a select group of leaders of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, which is basically like the big club for all of the top Catholic leaders in the country.

And this select group of leaders said, on the one hand, okay, super cool that you're a Catholic, really inspired by your leadership, really inspired that Catholicism is part of your message, love some of your policies, especially around immigration. And they said he furthers grave moral evils in advocating for more access to abortion, in advocating for the overturning of the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits most federal funding for most kinds of abortions, longstanding policy in the United States. So, you know, this has now kind of picked up steam from Inauguration Day, where there was that first hint that this was going to be a drama, where now the bishops have basically gotten together as a full group and agreed that not only is this a problem, but they're going to draft a teaching document,

which will talk about what it means to be worthy of receiving communion. Has this broken poor Biden's heart? I don't know. We have not gotten any kind of statement from Biden himself. The White House has continued its pretty traditional line, which is for him, it's personal, not political. As you all know, he is a deeply religious man. Biden is a cradle Catholic. He was educated by the nuns when he was living in Scranton and then moved to Delaware. And he talks all the time about how central this is. So you have to think that for someone who's really rode hard for the Catholic Church, so to speak, that it must be painful for the bishops to be picking this public fight with him. These bishops have a boss. They call him the Pope.

Yeah. How does Pope Francis feel about this? So Pope Francis has made it really clear that he did not want the bishops to go down this path. He had his head of doctrine, Cardinal Louis Ladaria in Rome, send a letter that basically said, we don't want to create disunity among the bishops in the United States. This is not the message that we want to be sending about the Eucharist. And that fundamentally from a theological perspective, we should be thinking about the Eucharist more as bread for sinners than a reward for saints. So, you know, this idea that everyone who is coming to Mass and receiving the sacrament of communion is a sinner and is going to have problems with the way that they've acted or spoken. And that act of taking communion is actually supposed to be healing rather than a kind

of reward or sticker that you earn for being perfect. So the bishops in the United States, certainly not all of them, but a lot of them, are blasting President Biden against the wishes of their boss, God's representative here on earth, the Pope, Pope Francis. I mean, that's the starkest version of it. But you mentioned there are bishops who remain at least neutral, silent, or even on Biden's side. What are other bishops in the United States saying? So there's been a really pretty astonishing public fracture among the bishops around this issue. It started out with that letter that some of the bishops from the conference published on Inauguration Day,

where a really high-profile cardinal in Chicago, Cardinal Cupich, actually publicly called them out on Twitter for sending out what he thought was a misguided and disorganized letter that was not sufficiently consultative. That's like a big deal. That does not happen, where you have a cardinal calling out other bishops on Twitter of all places. And for all the people watching at home who maybe don't know, cardinals sit somewhere between bishops and the Pope, right? That's right. This is kind of like the top dogs of the Catholic hierarchy besides the Pope. They're people who the Pope has specifically chosen to be elevated for their leadership, for specific offices that they hold. So it's a big deal when a cardinal

comes out against other Catholic leaders, because he's basically saying, you know, with all of my authority and the highness of the office that I hold, I think you're wrong. That's really big. And that's kept going as this is heated up, as we saw the bishops come together recently for their big meeting where they voted on this document. There was a lot of, I think, real grief over this public fight and also the potential consequences of it. In the meantime, can Biden get his bread or what? Well, so when it comes down to it, the person who has authority

over whether Biden is taking communion on a regular basis, at least when he's in Washington, is this guy named Cardinal Wilton Gregory, who oversees the Archdiocese of Washington. And he has made it really clear that Biden's cool. Biden can go into any church in the Archdiocese of Washington. And he has made it really clear that Biden's cool. Biden can go into any church in the Archdiocese of Washington and receive communion. He doesn't think that the right approach to this issue is to, as he said, go to the table with a gun and sort of put the gun on the table right from the outset. And in fact, I interviewed earlier this spring the priest who is in charge of the parish where Biden has gone most frequently in Georgetown. This is where he went often when he was vice president. Now that he's president, he's gone pretty frequently as well his I's, made sure that it was cool with Cardinal Gregory that he was coming and receiving communion.

But second, you know, from his perspective as the actual pastor in charge of this moment, he thinks it's a way for President Biden to improve his spiritual life, to come closer to Jesus, to come closer to God. You know, Catholicism is actually less centralized than a lot of people think. It's a lot of different fiefdoms with a lot of different sort of levers of control. That actually means that, you know, in the near future, I think Biden will be able to continue going to mass and taking communion. What isn't clear to me is, especially once this teaching document comes out, we're hoping for a copy of that in the fall, whether it's going to yield this kind of patchwork where as Biden travels around the country, his advance team is going to have to triple check that whatever church he's going to for mass, that he's not going to get into a public situation where he's being refused communion,

because I'm sure that would be very unpleasant for the White House. That tension is really real between the Vatican and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. I don't know what's going to happen in terms of the messages that the Vatican will send or the action that they'll take, but it is true that it's pretty stark to see the bishops go in a direction that so clearly was not the direction that Pope Francis had hoped for. And he will raise you up on eagle's wings, bear you on the breath of dawn, make you to shine like the sun, Like the song that told you in the palm of his hand. Support for Today Explained comes from Aura.

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The word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. Emma, is this all about Biden or has this sort of fissure between the Catholic Church and politicians in the United States ever happened before? Well, what we're seeing now is a kind of reenactment of something that happened in 2004 when John Kerry, who is also Catholic, was running as the Democratic nominee for president. I don't wear my religion on my sleeve, but faith. But faith has given me values and hope to live by from Vietnam to this day, from Sunday to Sunday. And I think the way that this is playing out differently now is an indication that politics has definitely crept into and shapes the way that the U.S. bishops do their business.

That nobody's immune from the kind of partisanship that shapes us all here in the United States. Is there this kind of division in other Christian denominations and other religions in the United States? Or does this feel like distinctly Catholic? You know, obviously, there are huge divisions within different denominations over everything from abortion to LGBT issues to the role that women can play in terms of teaching or preaching from the pulpit on Sunday morning. And this has been a source of fracture both within those denominations but also with famous political leaders. Jimmy Carter, a sort of born-bred heritage Southern Baptist,

left the Southern Baptist Convention 10, 15 years ago because of one of these issues around women. I had been a Baptist, a Southern Baptist, for 70 years. But the Southern Baptist Convention in the year 2000 decided that women should play a secondary position, a subservient position to men, that the scriptures are misinterpreted to keep men in an ascendant position. That is an all-pervasive problem. So, you know, they do play out. But I think what's interesting and distinctive about this context is that the Catholic Church, really, more than any other expression of Christianity, is this global church with a really central hierarchy, both the Pope in Rome, but also in the United States, having this conference of bishops.

And I think that national and global context really elevates this to a higher stage. And ultimately, as we established, the Pope sits atop that hierarchy. Can the Pope ultimately fire these bishops if it comes to a brink? There's a way of thinking about the Pope's authority, which is kind of like hard power and soft power. So yes, all of these bishops, these cardinals, they're all under the authority of the Pope. But a lot of the way that the church does business is sending signals and messages, especially when it comes to the Vatican, trying to communicate the preferences of the Pope or the different leaders of offices in the church in Rome, that's a little

squishier in terms of, you know, the Pope is not this high commander in the Death Star who gives orders and those are all the same and equal and hold the same weight and have to be handled in the same way. And there's not just tension on this issue of what to do about President Biden and communion. There's tension between bishops and Pope Francis on a number of issues, right? Yeah. He's the cool pope. He's trying to advance the church.

He's the rock star pontiff. I had some girls say to me the other day that he's cooler than One Direction. Yeah, he was the first pope took a selfie. And I, you know, for the record, I'm not stating whether or not he is cool. I'm not the minister of cool. I'm just a lowly reporter. But, you know, there is a contingent, especially in the United States, but in pockets around the world of bishops and leaders who don't agree with what you might call the style and message of Pope Francis his way of softening

the approach and the kind of pastoral language that's used around issues that have been very sensitive and caused a lot of pain in the church. I think this is particularly true on LGBT issues. He has a tendency to say things like famously on a papal plane, who am I to judge? And condemned what he described as lobbying by gay people. All lobbies are not good, he told reporters, but if a person is gay and seeks God and has goodwill, who am I to judge him? Which, of course, made so many Catholics really, really mad because they thought,

you know, what is he doing? What is he saying? That is not what the Catholic Church teaches. Now, while Pope Francis' comment is making global waves tonight, it's important to note the Pope said nothing to suggest acceptance of gay sex or any other change in church policy. What we saw today was really a shift in style, not substance. But when you're a pope, style can be very, very consequential. There's kind of a difference here in the pastoral approach generally. And we see that playing out among the bishops. And there's one approach that says we need to be definitive about what it means to be Catholic. And then there's another approach, which is more trying to sort of throw open the

doors. And I certainly think that Pope Francis has embodied that second approach more, which is sort of reaching people where they are, you know, as he always says, smelling like the sheep, right? Going and being out among the flock and not necessarily being perfect. You know, comparing Pope Francis to his predecessor, Pope Benedict, who is much more conservative, much more orthodox. I wonder, is this fight that we're seeing in the United States. Is it more really a fight about modernization, about bringing the Catholic Church into the 21st century, making it appealing and lasting for new generations of Catholics? Or is every issue the Catholic Church deals with, you know, that issue? You know, in terms of modernization, as say, a progressive in America would think about modernization. So coming to endorse LGBT people, having more openness on

women's reproductive rights, I would say the answer is definitively not. Pope Francis is not a liberal. He's certainly not a progressive in the American sense of the word. And on doctrinal issues around those kinds of identity matters and matters of human life, he's actually less different from Benedict than a lot of people might think. But what I do think is really different and distinct, and again, as some of the source of the conflict in this Biden controversy, is this difference in what they lead with, right? So Benedict was this renowned theologian. He worked on doctrinal issues in the Vatican before he was pope. And he was known for his writings, his sort of intellectual mind, his way of spelling things out in this very sort of rigid and logical way. And Pope Francis is, again, very off the cuff. I mean, it's also just a time where we're seeing declining religious participation, not just in Catholicism, but across any number of religions in the United States and across the world, is this really the best time to be ostracizing the president of the United States

when you should maybe be concerned about how you're going to hold on to a new generation of increasingly lapsed Catholics? So let me give both sides of that, how bishops from different perspectives would answer that. Definitely there is a perspective that would agree with what you just said, that this action, picking a public fight with the president of the United States who cares very much about being Catholic, is going to be alienating and hurtful to Catholics who love Joe Biden, to Catholics who feel mixed about the issue of abortion. There are a lot of LGBT Catholics out there who already struggle to fit into the church. And I think this kind of hardline message is really painful for a lot of Catholics and a lot

of people who might be interested in becoming Catholic. But, you know, I think there's a different perspective, which is what some of these more conservative bishops have been advocating, which is the Catholic Church has a set of teachings that they believe to be true. And they believe that those teachings are powerful, that they're for everyone, and that people can be brought in by understanding the truth of what they are, not a diluted version, knowing that it will be unpopular with some people, knowing that it doesn't fit with certain political platforms, certainly with the platform of the Democratic Party, but also some with their platform of the Republican Party. The viewpoint of the church articulates a worldview that just doesn't fit neatly in the left-right spectrum in America. You know, one of the things about this issue that is so notable to me is how very American it is. A lot of American Catholics have gone their own way.

A lot of American Catholics do not agree with the church on birth control. A smaller portion, but still a sizable portion, don't agree with the Catholic church on abortion. Certainly a sizable portion of American Catholics don't agree with teachings on LGBT issues and same-sex marriage. And yet, these are people who still feel an affinity with the Catholic church. So, you know, I think that's a really interesting way that religion plays out in America, where on the one hand, we are a deeply religious nation where people really care about those identities and those histories, those observances and rituals. But also people kind of make their own way of being and make their own version of the religion. And, you know, that ruffles some people's feathers. But I do think that this is a really American expression of conflict that you might not see play out in the same way in other places around the world.

Emma Green writes about politics, policy, and religion for The Atlantic. I'm Sean Ramos for him. This is Today Explained. in reverence for power, in blessing of peace, in pride and in power. Open thou mine eyes, and I shall see, incline my God, as the Daishas sing, incline my heart, the Daishas desire, In the midst of my grief Thank you.