Bishops may dodge rebuke of Biden over abortion

While some U.S. Catholic bishops continue to denounce President Joe Biden for his support of legal abortion, their conference as a whole is likely to avoid direct criticism of him at its upcoming national meeting.

The highest-profile agenda item is a proposed “teaching document” about the sacrament of Communion. Months of work on the document, by the conference’s Committee on Doctrine, coincided with sometimes heated debate among the bishops as to whether Biden and other Catholic politicians who support abortion rights are unworthy of receiving Communion.

A draft of the document circulating ahead of the Nov. 15-18 meeting in Baltimore breaks little new ground, though its language could be toughened during the gathering. The draft mentions abortion once and doesn’t name Biden or other politicians, though it says at one point, “Lay people who exercise some form of public authority have a special responsibility to embody Church teaching.”

A member of the doctrine committee, Bishop Michael Olson of Fort Worth, Texas, said he and his colleagues decided that the document should avoid any trace of partisan politics.

Yet Olson remains an outspoken critic of Biden’s abortion stance, saying the president has “upped the scale of scandal.”

“He’s gone on record as saying abortion is a fundamental right while presenting himself as an exemplary Catholic,” Olson said. “The issue of public confusion is really at stake here.”

While some bishops have made clear that they would deny Communion to Biden, there is no national policy on the matter. Cardinal Wilton Gregory, the archbishop of Washington, has affirmed that Biden is welcome to receive Communion there.

Last month, after a private meeting with Pope Francis at the Vatican, Biden said the subject of abortion was not raised but indicated he had the pontiff’s general support.

“We just talked about the fact he was happy that I was a good Catholic and I should keep receiving Communion,” Biden said.

One conservative bishop, Thomas Tobin of Providence, R.I., had urged Francis to confront Biden over abortion.

“Please challenge President Biden on this critical issue,” Tobin tweeted before the Vatican meeting. “His persistent support of abortion is an embarrassment for the Church and a scandal to the world.”

Throughout the year, Francis and some of his high-level aides have sought to tone down the anti-Biden sentiment with USCCB ranks, calling for dialogue and an approach to Communion that is pastoral rather than punitive.

Archbishop José Gomez of Los Angeles, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, formed a working group last year to assess the “complex and difficult situation” posed by the newly elected president’s stances on abortion and other issues that differ from official church teaching. Before disbanding, the group proposed the drafting of a new document addressing the issue of Communion — a project assigned to the doctrine committee.