Roman Catholic Clergy

The Roman Catholic Church's opposition to abortion has persisted in the United States even though since the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision women in the US have had a constitutionally protected right to elective abortion. The always controversial issue gained heightened visibility in 2004 with the publication of a statement by Bishop Rene Gracida, emeritus, of Corpus Christi, Texas, stating that "there is no excuse [for priests] to not deny Holy Communion to pro-abortion politicians" (Bishop). The report of Gracida's statement cites information about his personally seeing to it that a Texas politician who had "strayed" from the Church's anti-abortion stance was formally denied access to the sacraments of Communion and Anointing of the sick (Gracida). Two aspects of Catholic doctrine regarding Communion are relevant: 1) that it is necessary for the faithful to receive it under all but extraordinary circumstances in order to achieve salvation, and 2) that it is closed to both non-Catholics and to Catholi

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ry. If the bishop did not make that point in his own text, and even if he did by not strictly referring to the source of the sacrilege characterization, then it is necessary to conclude that the text is offering its opinion on the matter. That would have been avoided had the text specifically attributed the compound-sacrilege statement to the bishop. Quindlen's treatment of the denial of the sacrament to some Catholics is dated before Gracida's statement, but it shows that the practice has become part of public discourse. The main premise of Quindlen's text is that the Church as an institution has inappropriately, selectively, and contradictorily asserted religious authority in a partisan way over individual conscience and the customs and practices of civil law in a free society regarding the issue of abortion. A secondary premise is that the recent pedophile scandals in the church have robbed it of the moral authority to threaten Catholics with regard to sexual behavior. The conclusion is that Church authorities should stop threatening Catholics whose views of abortion they dislike with excommunication and damnation. Quindlen's article is manifestly an opinion piece. However, the opinion text develops out of the recitation of a
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Approximate Word count = 1380
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)

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