Some clarifications on the automatic penalties due to pro-choice Catholic polticians

Recently, I was reading a discussion on Catholic politicians like Biden and Pelosi who support abortion, where people were disagreeing on whether they were already excommunicated by the Church.  I felt the conversation was missing some key distinctions, so I compiled the following list of what I hope are clarifying questions and answers on the topic:

1. Are you automatically excommunicated for obstinate heresy or must your bishop excommunicate you?

According to canon 1364, you are automatically excommunicated for heresy.  This applies without the need for any intervention on the part of your bishop.  *However*, automatic excommunication is different from formal excommunication. Here's a quote from Canonist Dr. Peters on this distinction:

"Most consequences of excommunication become relevant in the external forum only if the excommunication is “imposed or declared”. That short, technical phrase means that, while one who is “automatically” excommunicated labors under the personal burdens of this sanction, it is only when an excommunication is “formal” that actions performed by canonical criminals raise questions for Church life and governance." (https://canonlawblog.wordpress.com/2015/09/26/automatic-censures-should-be-eliminated-from-church-law/)

Note that Peters is a passionate opponent of automatic censures in canon law and thinks that they should be abolished (and I think he's probably right), but nonetheless, he does not deny that they exist.

2. If you are automatically excommunicated due to obstinate heresy, shouldn't priests deny communion to all heretics?

No.  As mentioned, "latae sententiae" excommunication does not carry with it "external forum" consequences.  So, those conscious of heresy should not approach Holy Communion, but until the excommunication is made formal, priests don't have the right to presuppose such an excommunication.  However, there are other reasons aside from a known excommunication for which a priest can or must deny Communion which could easily apply at the same time (see below).

3. Is denial of Church teaching on abortion heresy and thus grounds for automatic excommunication?

Yes, *I* think so, but it's very arguable.  Some people have here confused the strict theological definition of heresy (which sometimes restricts "heresy" to those errors which are opposed to historically, formally, infallibly defined doctrines) with the canonical definition of heresy, which is the denial of doctrines which "must be believed by divine and Catholic faith".  There has never been a formal definition of a doctrine on abortion by an infallible act of the extraordinary Magisterium, but not all doctrines which must be believed by divine and Catholic faith have such formal definitions.  Others might disagree here, so I don't insist on this answer.

4. Supposing you're wrong about the heretical status of support for abortion.  Is a politician nevertheless automatically excommunicated for supporting abortion politically?

No, I think just for heresy.  *But* there are non-excommunication penalties that *will* apply to them automatically.

Here I think people are confused by Canon 915 which applies the penalty of exclusion from Communion to a range of people which includes those who are "obstinately persevering in manifest grave sin."  This *does* include politicians who support abortion through lawmaking, but is *not* an excommunication.  Exclusion from Communion is also the most serious and evident penalty of an excommunication, but it is not excommunication itself.  Meanwhile, Canon 1398 *does* apply automatic excommunication for those who *procure* an abortion (http://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG1104/__P57.HTM), but this doesn't apply to those who campaign for its legality.  (Well, I suppose you could make that argument, but I think it's weak.)

So the important distinction here is that a canonical exclusion from Holy Communion is not the same thing as excommunication, and different Canons govern when each of those things happen.

5. So maybe a politician won't be excommunicate for supporting abortion, but he will nevertheless be excluded from Holy Communion?

Yes, definitely.

6. Does exclusion from Holy Communion for politicians who support abortion happen automatically, or does a bishop have to institute a process?

It happens automatically, as specified in Canon 915.  What is necessary is grave, manifest, public sin, and political support for abortion fulfills all of those conditions.  There has been a lot of confusion on this topic, but it has been well clarified by the CDF here: https://www.ewtn.com/catholicism/library/worthiness-to-receive-holy-communion-general-principles-2153, for example.  For much more information on this subject, Dr. Peters has an entire resource page devoted to Canon 915: http://www.canonlaw.info/canonlaw915.htm.  So, yes, absolutely Biden should be excluded from Holy Communion and no further act of a bishop is necessary for this to happen.  Again, though: not the same thing as an excommunication.

7. Since Biden has not been formally been charged with heresy or excommunicated, should we refrain from publicly calling him out as a "bad Catholic"?

This is my opinion, but I think definitely not.  A large part of the point behind "latae sententiae" penalties (and especially exclusion from Holy Communion) for figures who publicly promote grave sin is to head off scandal.  If public figures are allowed to flaunt Church teaching and yet (also publicly) receive Holy Communion, many people are going to wonder if the Church really teaches the doctrine that is being contradicted.  By having this strict and automatic penalties in the Law, the Church is making a very strong statement: "hey, whoever does this is *not* living according to the mind of the Church".  In other words, it's an ecclesiastical way of saying, "you can't be Catholic and pro-choice", without having to go through the whole legal trial process every time for every famous pro-choice Catholic.

From that perspective, Catholics calling out duplicitous politicians like Biden on this issue seem to me to be fulfulling exactly the intention of the law.

Steyn on the damage feminism's cultural changes have wrought

Here's a post from Mark Steyn I found powerful.  It's about the "Montreal Massacre", about which I knew nothing until reading his post, in which fourteen women college students were killed after all of the men in their class simply walked away at the order of a crazed gunman.  Steyn takes this story as symptomatic of the loss of masculine spine in modern culture:

https://www.steynonline.com/9892/men-walked-away

Here's an extended quote I found particularly powerful:

When another Canadian director, James Cameron, filmed Titanic, what most titillated him were the alleged betrayals of convention. It's supposed to be "women and children first", but he was obsessed with toffs cutting in line, cowardly men elbowing the womenfolk out of the way and scrambling for the lifeboats, etc. In fact, all the historical evidence is that the evacuation was very orderly. In real life, First Officer William Murdoch threw deckchairs to passengers drowning in the water to give them something to cling to, and then he went down with the ship – the dull, decent thing, all very British, with no fuss. In Cameron's movie, Murdoch takes a bribe and murders a third-class passenger. (The director subsequently apologized to the First Officer's home town in Scotland and offered £5,000 toward a memorial. Gee, thanks.) Mr Cameron notwithstanding, the male passengers gave their lives for the women, and would never have considered doing otherwise. "An alien landed" on the deck of a luxury liner – and men had barely an hour to kiss their wives goodbye, and watch them clamber into the lifeboats to sail off without them. The social norm of "women and children first" held up under pressure. 

Today, in what Harvey Mansfield calls our "gender-neutral society", there are no social norms. Eight decades after the Titanic, a German-built ferry en route from Estonia to Sweden sank in the Baltic Sea. Of the 1,051 passengers, only 139 lived to tell the tale. But the distribution of the survivors was very different from that of the Titanic. Women and children first? No female under 15 or over 65 made it. Only five per cent of all women passengers lived. The bulk of the survivors were young men. Forty-three per cent of men aged 20-24 made it.

"There is no law that says women and children first," Roger Kohen of the International Maritime Organization told Time magazine. "That is something from the age of chivalry."

If, by "the age of chivalry", you mean the early 20th century.

 There's a lot to unpack from this comparison.  Here are my thoughts:

1. In Titanic, again we see the reinterpretation of history in the hands of filmmakers in order to fit a particular worldview, and this in one of the most watched films of all time.
2. In the "women and children first" rule, one of the first principles of "chivalry" is revealed: the point is that the strong should protect the weak.  It is, of course, very improper nowadays to say anything to imply that woman is the "weaker sex", but when reality interposes itself upon ideology, ideology always has to give way.  If you forbid all sexual discrimination as contrary to polite thought, then it really has to be "every man or woman for themselves" in a crisis--and then because of irreducible differences of biology, almost three times as many men will survive.

The whole article is worth reading.

Important discussion on China and rare earth

Good discussion on recent moves by China to leverage its dominance in rare earth production, and how this attempt may not be working.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4uV5fvSZFoE&feature=em-uploademail&fbclid=IwAR2ah8YLOn9jNVW8_5nswlck_ijVHjj9nYz9QY8dym3tnbzOspsHm-qvz6k

By the way, the environmental impacts of mining rare earths is one of the best reasons to consider moving heavy industrial production into space eventually, as Jeff Bezos has advocated:

https://timesofsandiego.com/tech/2019/11/23/jeff-bezos-in-san-diego-to-save-planet-move-all-heavy-industry-into-space/

David Gibson, plaintiff in the Oberlin lawsuit, has died

This is a very good retrospective on his character and the controversy in which he became involved: https://quillette.com/2019/12/02/on-the-passing-of-oberlin-plaintiff-david-gibson/

I think this story is important for a few reasons:

1. I think it's important that many people know what a decent person David Gibson actually was.  Part of the damage that echo-chamber, ideology driven culture does is that we reduce people to caricatures that fit our narratives.  David Gibson was clearly wronged by this impulse.  He was  a White Man who Called the Cops on Young Black Men--and therefore subjected to all the race-war social justice theories Oberlin incubates.  In cases where the narrative takes precedence over reality and smears a decent person (Covington Catholic kid is yet another example), I think it's important to loudly correct the record.  This article does so.
2. David Gibson's actions strike me as an example of a very American sort of virtue: anybody shoplifting gets the police called on them, because nobody's above the law and everybody gets treated equally.  BUT, he'll work with you and the police: get a lecture, promise to try to be good, the charge will be reduced.  It's a small-town, do-it-yourself, personal-communication-based approach to crime and recidivism.  I like this a lot, because ultimately it's people and not programs who make a difference in troubled lives.  People who think in terms of grand social schemes to reduce inequality and crime overlook this type of approach at their peril.
3. It's still really mind-boggling how Oberlin could have gotten itself into this situation.  It would have been so easy for them to have apologized as requested, and it should have been easy for it to see that it was the right thing to do.  How a collection of supposedly elite intellects could have been so ridiculously wrong and blind about it is a question that demands to be answered.  Sadly, I don't see any impulse among the people who matter to ask this question of themselves.  The universities marinate in absurd ideology and have long lost the ability to honestly grapple with reality outside of it.