Articles

Most Rev. Salvatore J. Cordileone
First Things, June 23 2021

The history of Catholic immigrants to the United States and their descendants is exemplary of the American dream, and intertwined with the Democratic party. I myself am a typical example of this Catholic Democratic legacy. My grandparents were immigrants, arriving here dirt-poor from Sicily. My father grew up in his father’s trade and was a commercial fisherman; my maternal grandfather was a cement mason. They were classic working-class people. Both of my parents were registered Democrats—New Deal Democrats—their whole lives. What the Democratic party, with its vital support for labor unions, brought to our country at the time helped my family survive and thrive, and made possible even greater opportunities for my siblings, my cousins, and myself.  

It was a bit disconcerting, then, when on June 18, sixty Democratic members of Congress, all Catholics, issued a significant “Statement of Principles” in response to a decision by U.S. Catholic bishops to develop a teaching document on the nature of the Eucharist and its proper reception. In their statement, the members of Congress argue that “the Sacrament of Holy Communion is central to the life of practicing Catholics, and the weaponization of the Eucharist to Democratic lawmakers for their support of a woman’s safe and legal access to abortion is contradictory.” They go on to “solemnly urge” the bishops “to not move forward and deny [lawmakers] this most holy of all sacraments” over one issue.

The statement raises many troubling questions. While I speak only for myself in this column, the public nature of the statement invites a public response and provides an excellent opportunity for candid dialogue. In that spirit, allow me to begin the dialogue with comments on some specific passages from the statement.

Item one:

As Catholic Democrats in Congress, we are proud to be part of the living Catholic tradition–a tradition that unfailingly promotes the common good, expresses a consistent moral framework for life, and highlights the need to provide a collective safety net to those individuals in society who are the most vulnerable.

A “consistent moral framework for life” would logically seem to exclude laws that enable the killing of the most vulnerable and innocent in society: the unborn. Surely the members of Congress know, as committed Catholics, that the early Church described abortion as a form of homicide, and that the Christian community condemned abortion as early as the first century in the Didache. Nor can we ignore the pain caused to many women, and others in their networks of relationships, by the emotional scars of abortion.  

Item two:

. . . we work every day to advance respect for life and the dignity of every human being.

Except, that is, those human beings who are still in the womb, or even partially born.

Item three:

We are committed to making real the basic principles that are at the heart of Catholic social teaching: helping the poor, disadvantaged, and the oppressed, protecting the least among us and ensuring that all Americans of every faith are given meaningful opportunities to share in the blessings of this great country.

One of the “basic principles” of Catholic belief is rather blunt and simple: Don’t intentionally kill, or collude in enabling others to kill, innocent human life. Catholic principles build systematically on one another. The protection of innocent, defenseless life is first and foundational.

Item four:

That commitment is fulfilled in different ways by legislators but includes: reducing the rising rates of poverty, particularly child poverty; increasing access to education for all; pressing for access to universal health care; recognizing the dignity of all humans; and repairing long-standing racial and gender inequities in our society.

These are admirable words, but if they are also sincere convictions, then why would Catholic members of Congress support laws that have the effect of destroying the natural family through marriage redefinition, no-fault divorce, and other similar policies? More than fifty years of social science data show the devastating effect that family fragmentation has on children, especially in situations of fatherlessness. Not only is the broken family a leading cause of poverty, but it also results in a host of other social ills, such as youth violence, incarceration, and substance abuse.

Item five:

We envision a world in which every child belongs to a loving family and agree with the Catholic Church about the value of human life.

What does a “loving family” mean when lawmakers redefine “family” to be whatever consenting adults want it to be, reimagining the natural family out of existence? Again, all reliable studies show that children do best with a (male) father and (female) mother in a stable, low-conflict, life-long commitment of marriage. Instead of advocating for policies that promote this proven model, why would any self-described “Catholic” lawmaker advance policies that dismantle it, even punishing adoption agencies that will only place children for adoption in homes with these kinds of parents? Moreover, their agreement “with the Catholic Church about the value of human life” excludes the value of human life in the womb.

Item six:

Each of us is committed to reducing the number of unintended pregnancies and creating an environment with policies that encourage pregnancies to be carried to term and provide resources to raise healthy and secure children. We believe this includes promoting alternatives to abortion, such as adoption, improving access to children's healthcare and child care, and creating a child benefit through the expanded and improved Child Tax Credit.

It’s worth asking what Catholic lawmakers have actually done to promote adoption. Or to create “an environment with policies that encourage pregnancies to be carried to term.” Such an environment would be a robust marriage culture, and that is exactly what too many Catholic legislators have helped to destroy. It’s also worth asking how many and which of the statement’s signers have positive ratings from NARAL and Planned Parenthood. Abortion is not just a controversial social issue, or a debate about “choice” vs. life in the womb; in the United States, abortion is a lucrative industry with a vigorous lobby. Adoption and other policies that help women bring their children to term reduce sales for Planned Parenthood. Perhaps that’s why we find so little evidence for them.

Item seven:

In all these issues, we seek the Church’s guidance and assistance but believe also in the primacy of conscience.

It’s hard to see this passage as anything less than evasion. Conscience is not deciding what’s right or wrong for oneself. We don’t invent truth; we search it out with “the Church’s guidance,” and then submit ourselves to it. Conscience is the faculty to know and do what’s right in concrete situations, whether we find it politically convenient or not.  

Item eight:

In recognizing the Church’s role in providing moral leadership, we acknowledge and accept the tension that comes with being in disagreement with the Church in some areas.

Disagreement in some areas? As in, the legitimacy of enabling and tolerating the killing of 66,000,000 unborn children in a fifty-year period? The abortion issue involves not just a tactical disagreement on a policy matter. This is a heinous evil. It’s comparable to “disagreeing” on the evil of lynching or human trafficking. 

Item nine:

We also urge the Church to heed the words of Our Holy Father Pope Francis, who wrote in his Apostolic Exhortation, “ The Joy of the Gospel ,” that “the Eucharist although it is the fullness of sacramental life, is not a prize for the perfect but a powerful medicine and nourishment for the weak.” 

I would offer a similar reminder from the Second Vatican Council: “Life must be protected with the utmost care from the moment of conception: abortion and infanticide are abominable crimes” (Gaudium et spes 51; emphasis added). Nowhere does Francis suggest otherwise, nor could he; his predecessor Pius XI, to cite just one of many examples, called abortion “the direct murder of the innocent.” Nor does Francis anywhere endorse the specific kind of “decisions in conscience” suggested by the congresspersons’ statement. How any lawmaker claiming to be Catholic might consistently tolerate policies enabling not merely an injustice, but an ongoing form of intentional homicide, is unclear to me.

Item ten:

As legislators, we too are charged with being facilitators of the Constitution which guarantees religious freedom for all Americans.

True and admirable words, but then why would any Catholic lawmaker fail to protect the Little Sisters of the Poor, Catholic Charities adoption agencies, or Catholic schools seeking to ensure the integrity of their mission by not retaining faculty who are working against or publicly living as a counter-witness to it?

Item eleven:

We believe the separation of church and state allows for our faith to inform our public duties and best serve our constituents.

Agreed. The trouble is that so many of the statement’s legislators seem to conform and restrict their faith to the platform of the Democratic party.

Item twelve:

The Sacrament of Holy Communion is central to the life of practicing Catholics, and the weaponization of the Eucharist to Democratic lawmakers for their support of a woman’s safe and legal access to abortion is contradictory.

It is rather the statement’s signers who “weaponize” the Eucharist precisely by issuing their public letter. And this suggests a regrettable level of calculated cynicism. The bishops’ motivation is pastoral: the salvation of souls and reparation of scandal. There is nothing punitive in stating and restating the truth of Catholic belief, and its implications for an authentically Catholic life.

Item thirteen:

No elected officials have been threatened with being denied the Eucharist as they support and have supported policies contrary to the Church teachings, including supporting the death penalty, separating migrant children from their parents, denying asylum to those seeking safety in the United States,  limiting assistance for the hungry and food insecure,  and denying rights and dignity to immigrants.

Very true. These are serious, pressing matters that demand our attention and action. But they are different in kind, not simply in degree, from issues like genocide, infanticide, deliberate violence against civilian populations in war, euthanasia, and abortion. None of the issues listed by the lawmakers, important as they are, involves the sustained, intentional killing of innocent human life.

Item fourteen:

To pursue a blanket denial of the Holy Eucharist to certain elected officials would indeed grieve the Holy Spirit and deny the evolution of that individual, a Christian person who is never perfect, but living in the struggle to get there.

No one is suggesting a “blanket denial” of Communion to dissenting lawmakers, and the statement’s signers surely know it. This is not what the bishops’ proposed document is for; it would rather serve as a resource to a bishop in guiding his deliberations in this matter. It has been stated quite clearly and repeatedly that this document will not mention any particular individuals. Note too that I would warmly welcome any evidence of any of the statement’s signers struggling to come to understand the Church’s vision of what being pro-life really means, and accepting that.

Item fifteen: 

We believe the Church as a community is called to be in the vanguard of creating a more just America and world.

Amen—and the right to life is the foundational human right. The most vulnerable and defenseless must be protected; that’s the first step to a just society. Without it, everything else is just a band-aid on fatal wounds.

We need faithful Catholics in both political parties to fight for a civilization of truth and love. 

The Democratic party of my youth was the champion of “the little guy”—the factory hand, the farmer, the blue-collar worker. We bishops are charged with teaching the fullness of the faith both to the powerful and to the powerless. In that capacity, I ask each representative who signed this letter to commit to protecting the “littlest guys and gals” of all. Abortion is the axe laid to the roots of the tree of human life. Claims to respect the equal dignity of every human being sound hollow when one systematically enables or tolerates denying the right to life of the most vulnerable.

 Rejecting abortion is a tall order for a Catholic Democrat in the current environment, I know. But this week especially, the week when we remember St. Thomas More, is a good time to look deep in the soul and ask: Will I be God’s servant first?  

Americans’ right to worship is being denied by governments.
I won’t be silent anymore.

Most Rev. Salvatore J. Cordileone
The Washington Post, September 16, 2020

I never expected that the most basic religious freedom, the right to worship — protected so robustly in our Constitution’s First Amendment — would be unjustly repressed by an American government.

But that is exactly what is happening in San Francisco. For months now, the city has limited worship services to just 12 people outdoors. Worship inside our own churches is banned. The city recently announced it will now allow 50 for outdoor worship, with a goal of permitting indoor services up to a maximum of 25 people by Oct. 1 — less than 1 percent of the capacity of San Francisco’s St. Mary’s Cathedral.

This is not nearly enough to accommodate the hundreds of thousands of Catholics in San Francisco. In imposing these restrictions, the city is turning a great many faithful away from their houses of prayer.

People can freely go to parks here, as long as they stay six feet apart. If they follow proper social distancing and wear masks, people can eat on an outdoor patio with no hard numerical limit. Indoor shopping malls are already open at 25 percent capacity. Catholics in San Francisco are increasingly noticing the simple unfairness. As one of my parishioners asked recently, “Why can I spend three hours indoors shopping for shoes at Nordstrom’s but can’t go to Mass?”

And it is not just San Francisco. According to the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, six states with a combined population of 67 million Americans single out religious worship for unfavorable treatment compared to similar secular activities: California, New Jersey, Maine, Virginia, Connecticut and Nevada.

We Catholics are not indifferent to the very real dangers posed by covid-19. This is one of the reasons Catholic churches have developed rigorous protocols to protect public health in our facilities. We submitted our safety plans to the city in May along with other faith communities, and while indoor retailers had their plans approved and went into operation, we are still waiting to hear back.

Meanwhile, the scientific evidence from other jurisdictions is clear: These safeguards are working. As three infectious-disease specialists who reviewed the evidence on more than 1 million public Masses over the past few months concluded, there have been no documented outbreaks of covid-19 linked to church attendance in churches that follow the protocols. We have demonstrated that we know how to hold Mass safely. There is no reason not to allow us to put that knowledge into practice.

Nor do our concerns stem from hostility toward government. We Catholics respect legitimate authority, and we recognize that the government has a right to impose reasonable public health rules, just as we recognize its right to issue safety codes for our church buildings. But when government asserts authority over the church’s very right to worship, it crosses a line. Our fundamental rights do not come from the state. As the authors of our Declaration of Independence put it, they are “self-evident,” that is, they come from God.

Even this injustice, though, is not as hurtful as the simple lack of compassion. I sometimes wonder whether the increasingly secular elites imposing these restrictions understand the pain they are unnecessarily inflicting. The sacraments as we Catholics understand them cannot be live-streamed. People are being denied the religious worship that connects them with God and one another. For hundreds of thousands of San Franciscans facing the simultaneous challenges of a pandemic and economic downturn, the church is their key source of spiritual, emotional and practical help. I worry about the poor, the jobless and especially the addicted whose major access to community help is the Alcoholics Anonymous meetings formerly held in churches all over the city and the country.

As one of my parishioners, Kathryn Reese, wrote recently in the San Francisco Chronicle: “Even more than food for my body, this is food for my soul. I need it. My faith is what got me through all these years, raising my kids, going through a divorce, working as a correctional officer and correctional counselor in San Quentin, and volunteering for my community.” And the Rev. Moises Agudo, who pastors the overwhelmingly Latino churches in the Mission District, echoes the sentiment, saying that his people have lost many things because of the pandemic but “the consolations of the Mass should not be one of those things.”

We want to be partners in protecting the public health, but we cannot accept profoundly harmful and unequal treatment without resisting. This is why I and other Catholics from across San Francisco will join in a public demonstration this Sunday calling on the city’s mayor, London Breed, to treat religious believers fairly.
At our demonstration, we will not be asking for special treatment. We just don’t want religious worshipers singled out for unfavorable treatment relative to people participating in activities with comparable risk profiles. All we are seeking is access to worship in our own churches, following reasonable safety protocols — the same freedoms now extended to customers of nail salons, massage services and gyms. It’s only fair, it’s only compassionate, and, unlike with these other activities, it’s what the First Amendment demands.

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Most Rev. Salvatore J. Cordileone
The Washington Post, June 30, 2020

To the protesters who tore down his statue in Los Angeles this month, the priest, friar and saint Junípero Serra represents “hate, bigotry and colonization,” as one activist put it. Nothing would have made Serra sadder, for the real man was a profound lover of all people and especially of the indigenous peoples he came to serve.

Seen through the lens of the present, many heroes of history may seem unworthy of their pedestals. But some, such as Serra, still deserve our esteem.Who, then, is Junípero Serra after all?

First and foremost, Serra represents the true spirit of a church identified with the poor and outcast. He left his home, his family, his sinecure as a philosophy professor to offer the very best thing he had to the California people: the news that God Himself loved them enough to send His only Son to die on a cross to redeem them. Saint Junípero Serra is “the Apostle of California.”

Serra repeatedly intervened for mercy on behalf of indigenous rebels against Spanish authorities. He famously walked to Mexico City with a painful ulcerated leg to obtain the authority to discipline the military who were abusing the indigenous people. Then he walked back.

And his legacy lives on. The 21 missions founded by Serra and his brother Franciscans are the state’s oldest structures and among its most visited historic monuments. The churches are a physical sign of the Catholic Church’s respect for local cultures, enriched and transformed by the love of Jesus Christ. Mission architecture is widely copied precisely because its innovation speaks so strikingly to Southwestern culture.

There is no denying that Native Americans in California endured grave human rights abuses. They suffered wrongs during all three eras: the Spanish colonization (known as the Mission era), the Mexican secularization and the American era. But Serra should not bear the weight of all that went wrong and all who did wrong. If we looked at him with clear eyes, we would see Serra as one of the first American champions of the human rights of indigenous peoples, a man who protested abusive police powers by government authorities.

The deaths that occurred during the Mission era were primarily from disease. The greater, more deliberate devastation happened later, when secular governments took control. As UCLA historian Benjamin Madley writes in his book “American Genocide”: “Murders and massacres filled the archives.” As Santa Clara University historian Robert Senkewicz told the National Catholic Reporter, “We do know what did happen when religious groups were not present to try to protect native peoples.” The genocide of native peoples happened primarily during the gold rush, he points out, “when Americans offered bounties for Indian scalps and the native peoples of Northern California were brutally decimated and oppressed.”

History is often not kind to heroes. George Washington sacrificed to found a great country. He also owned slaves he freed only upon his death. Leland Stanford, founder of a great university, was an abolitionist but also continued genocidal policies against the Indians. Haight-Ashbury, the San Francisco symbol of free love, is named after Henry Haight, who in 1867 called the Chinese a “servile, effeminate and inferior race” that would “pollute and desecrate” Americans’ democratic heritage. He was elected governor of California in a landslide.

We are not yet a nation that lives up to our founding creed of liberty and justice for all. We can and must do better. That is precisely why we ought to look to Serra as an inspiration to heroic virtue and as an emblem of American diversity. His is the path to peace, equality and racial justice. The first Hispanic American saint, he is also the first saint to be canonized on U.S. soil and by the first pope from the Americas. At the canonization ceremony, Pope Francis said Serra represents a fearless willingness to engage with the other with the love of Christ: “He learned how to bring to birth and nurture God’s life in the faces of everyone he met; he made them his brothers and sisters.”

Father Junípero Serra died a beloved figure, mourned by indigenous people and Spaniards alike: a symbol of reconciliation, of hope and of the profound love he bore toward the people he strove to serve. His life reminds us of a core tenet of the Catholic faith: that the spirit of poverty, service and simplicity is the way to peace.

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