The objection arose a few days after Francesco’s congratulatory phone call to Joe Biden. A number of US bishops and anti-abortion associations have questioned whether the second Catholic president after John Kennedy could receive Communion, given his positions on termination of pregnancy. And the question that reached the top of the bishops’ conference, forcing President Jos Gomez, archbishop of Los Angeles, to create a working group to resolve the issue. It will be chaired by the archbishop of Detroit, Allen Vigneron, a leading exponent of conservative Catholicism. Not only. Gomez, chosen as the bridge of a torn episcopate, said that Biden advocates policies that attack certain core values we hold dear; and puts the American Church in a difficult and complex situation.
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And to think that at the beginning of November Gomez was the first, in the US ecclesiastical hierarchy, to greet the election by acknowledging the victory of the Democratic candidate, while Donald Trump insisted on fraud by inciting the hard and pure of the Republican Party. But the wing of the conservative bishops, weakened and exacerbated by the papacy of Jorge Mario Bergoglio, remains combative. He did not hide a certain preference for Trump precisely on issues such as abortion; n renounces criticizing a pontificate considered too progressive, and a source of disorientation. And for years he has had a profound distrust of a Democratic Party identified with relativism and secularism. On the other hand, already during the presidential campaign a parish priest had refused to give Communion to Biden, creating divisions and controversies.
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Now that the case seems to resurface, in the Vatican there are those who remember the elections in the United States of 2004. Then, the Democratic candidate against George W. Bush was John Kerry, a Catholic from Boston. And, despite being a practitioner, Kerry was skewered by the leaders of the Holy See: they were discussing termination of pregnancy or the use of stem cells. He seems to me a Catholic in a manner of speaking, given his position on abortion, the then archbishop of Genoa, Tarcisio Bertone, later Secretary of State of Benedict XVI, boiled it. And in the end, Kerry, who also tried to value his religious credentials, was beaten by the Protestant George W. Bush with the decisive vote of the Catholics. The prospect of a Kerry syndrome for Biden too, however, appears remote.
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Biden not a candidate: been elected president. Second: he has kept a cautious profile, being careful not to set his campaign on religious themes. Third: Trump not Bush. Fourth element, of weight: in Rome there is Francis, not John Paul II. And although relations between the Pope and the US bishops are tense, the feeling that there will be no anti-Biden campaign, perhaps to indirectly target Bergoglio. It is difficult to think that the episcopal conference will take a collective position to criticize the new president, explains one of the men closest to the Pontiff. Archbishop Gomez would disagree. He cannot ignore the reservations of some bishops; but in the end the choice will be left to the individual, case by case. A different strategy, conflicting with the new White House, would be a boomerang.
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Who in Casa Santa Marta, the residence of Francis, follows the evolution of the Church in the United States, it tends to reduce the anti-Biden protest to the backlash of about twenty disappointed pro-Republican bishops: a sort of undertow of Trump’s defeat and his complaints so far proved unfounded. possible. But the conservative wave can subside or remain high and threatening, depending on the choices the new president makes; and of the mortgage that the more radical sectors of the Democratic Party will impose on him. According to a Gallup agency survey, for Biden 49 percent of Catholics voted, for Trump 50 percent. For this reason it will not be easy to recompose the unity invoked by Francis: also because the papal appointments in some dioceses such as Washington and Chicago continue to divide.
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Trump beaten but his America still exists. And in a certain Catholicism it has a stronghold that the Argentine Pontiff does not seem able to scratch.
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November 24, 2020 (change November 24, 2020 | 23:14)
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