Pope Francis says bishops should be pastors, not politicians in American debate over Biden’s denial of communion over abortion

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“The problem is not theological, it is pastoral,” Francis told the press as he traveled from Slovakia to Rome on Wednesday. “How we bishops treat this principle. We must be pastors, also with the excommunicated. As God with passion and tenderness. The Bible says so.”

His comments come amid a slow-burning debate in the U.S. Catholic Church over granting communion to Catholic politicians who support abortion rights, including the nation’s second Catholic president. Biden had been denied the sacrament in the run-up to the election and the issue drew attention in June when the Conference of Catholic Bishops of the United States proceeded to a plan that could deny communion to these public figures, establishing a possible public reproach of the president.

By a vote of 168 to 55, with six abstentions, the bishops had advanced with plans for a report on the significance of the Eucharist in the church. Voting is part of a longer process and the Vatican should approve any action on behalf of the bishops.

Catholics for Choice, a liberal Catholic group that advocates for abortion rights, said at the time that it was “deeply saddened” by the vote and condemned to use the Eucharist “as a weapon of punishment.”

“In a country and a church already full of tension and division, today bishops chose to be partisan rather than pastoral, cruel rather than Christ-like,” the group said. They have chosen to disobey Jesus’ command to “feed on one another,” but everyday American Catholics (67% of whom oppose the retention of communion and other sacraments by supporters of human rights) ‘abortion) will continue to know better and improve “.

An advocate for abortion rights and the first American Catholic president in nearly 60 years, Biden shows a devotion to regular religious services not seen by recent presidents, who were professed Christians but who intermittently attended church or they worshiped in private while in office.

He married his late first wife, Neilia, in a Catholic church, attends weekly Mass, and attains his political speech with quotations from the Scriptures, Catholic hymns, and references to the nuns and priests from whom he learned in school. .

Pew polls show that more than half of American Catholics favor abortion rights, and most American Catholics do not believe Biden should be denied communion.

“The pastor knows what to do. Every time he leaves the pastoral path of the church he immediately becomes a politician,” Francis said Wednesday.

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