Ignoring Canon 915? Baffling.

Grave and manifest: an archbishop's odd logic on withholding Communion

In a a fine column that appears this week in the archdiocesan newspaper, The Catholic Review, Archbishop Edwin O'Brien of Baltimore has joined dozens of other American bishops in affirming that the protection of innocent human life is the paramount political issue of our time....

However, I am baffled by a passage in his article, in which Arcbishop O'Brien announces that he will not withhold the Eucharist from Catholic public officials who persist in supporting the destruction of human life. The logic of the archbishop's argument escapes me.

There is no "logic" to it - that's why the rationalization (not logic) escapes Mr. Lawler as well as every other faithful Catholic who has read and understood Archbishop Burke's clear and comprehensible writings on this subject as well as the 2004 letter to American bishops by then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger on this same subject.

Mr Lawler succintly states what many of us know and sense:

A politician's public support for legal abortion certainly qualifies as "manifest;" that much cannot be denied. When he announces that he will never invoke the provisions of Canon 915, then, a bishop leads us to draw one of two logical inferences: Either he does not consider support for legal abortion a "grave" matter, or he does not respect the laws of the Church and the need to avoid scandal.

Amen!