Is the Pope Catholic? Is the Catholic Church Catholic? Is Christianity Christian?

I am a confessing Lutheran. I am always reluctant to sound off on a controversy in another religious tradition. I sense that most people these days would understand why. After all, people have a right to their religious beliefs, and while I have every right to agree or disagree with them, there's a sense in which they are none of my business. Just as others have every right to form associations with others who believe what they do (we call them "denominations," and "congregations," or "parishes"), they have every right to practice their religion according to the dictates of their consciences, both individually and collectively.

Except when they don't, it seems.

A "married" lesbian judge (quotation marks theological rather than legal) has been denied Communion in a Catholic church in Michigan. The media doesn't "get" it.  It treats the issue as "inclusiveness," rather than the fact that the judge's lifestyle is a living repudiation of Catholic teaching. She later received Communion at a local United Methodist Church (thereby incurring automatic excommunication under Catholic canon law for that alone), apparently as oblivious as the Methodist pastor who administered it to the point that the Methodist and Roman Catholic churches radically disagree- among many other things- about the significance of the Lord's Supper and what excluding a person from it means. The Catholic priest, of course, had no intention of denying the judge had "value and meaning and purpose). But neither he nor, if we believe the Gospels, Jesus himself agrees that Jesus indiscriminately embraces the sin along with the sinner. 

"Why exclude anyone who sincerely wants to come to God's table?" Because they want something other than what God offers there- an affirmation of their sin, rather than forgiveness for it? Social liberals often disingenuously point out that Jesus never specifically discussed homosexuality, a bogus argument they also make about abortion, as if one could not conclude from what He did say that he was opposed to anything He didn't specifically mention by name. But in fact, He explicitly endorsed the Old Testament's teaching on the moral character of homosexuality and the rest of the moral law in the Sermon on the Mount, in the process of condemning the very relaxing of that very law of which "progressive" Christians are guilty. And despite the equally disingenuous rhetoric from the social left about the eating of pork and shellfish, the distinction between the civil and ceremonial laws of ancient Israel on one hand and the moral law on the other has always been recognized by Judaism as well as by Christianity. Arguments that the prohibition of homosexual activity was merely ceremonial rather than moral are, like most arguments of the sexual revisionists, convincing only to those who are bound and determined in advance to be convinced.

It's worth noting that the United Methodist Church, too, officially rejects same-sex "marriage" on theological grounds. But that's the affair of the United Methodist Church, just as the teaching of the Roman Catholic Church is the affair of the Roman Catholic Church. The judge has apparently found a church (or at least a local congregation) with whose teachings she agrees, though it is as in direct defiance of the public teaching of the United Methodist Church as the prior practice of her former parish was in defiance of the Roman Catholic faith. But she needn't pretend that nobody has a right to disagree with her beliefs- including the Roman Catholic Church, and the priest who adhered to them in excluding her from the Sacrament.

Joe Biden was recently refused Communion in a Catholic church at which he attended Mass. The same thing happened to Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry in 2004. There is nothing about that which ought to be surprising. Biden supports legal abortion, which the Catholic church teaches is murder. Despite the famous "Cuomo dodge," whereby the late New York Gov. Mario Cuomo claimed that although he, as a Catholic, supported his church's teaching on the subject, he was obliged to enforce the law, enforcement is not the point. Enforcing the law is one thing;  actively opposing the repeal of what one claims to regard as an unjust law is another. And the Catholic Church teaches both that the faithful are obliged to oppose unjust laws, and that Roe v. Wade is one such law. Archbishop Joseph Nauman instructed Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius to refrain from receiving Communion until she repented of her sin in vetoing an anti-abortion bill in 2008, and was careful to explain his reasons. They are rooted in the simple proposition that 1) to commune at a Catholic altar is to confess the Catholic faith in its entirety; and that 2) as long as Gov. Sebelius persisted in her opposition to the bill in question, she was not in agreement with the Catholic faith.

The issue was not one of the bishop trying to tell the governor what she had to believe. It was a matter of his pointing out that what she believed was not what the Roman Catholic Church believes, and that it was, therefore, as dishonest for her to publicly confess a position which she did not, in fact, hold as it would be for a priest to misrepresent what the Catholic Church teaches by communing her,

I'll say it one more time: even though the media and the culture seem not to understand this,  it's not that the Catholic Church (or any other church which holds to St. Paul's teaching in I Corinthians 11:17-34) is trying to force anybody to agree with it. Not even Catholics have to believe a darned thing.  Not being Catholics anymore is always an option. But if one doesn't believe what the Catholic Church believes, in the Catholic and- I, as a confessional Lutheran, would argue- scriptural and certainly historical understanding, a person who did not share the confession of the Catholic Church ought not to be communing at a Catholic altar in any case.

The real issue here is whether the Catholic Church- or ANY church- has a right to its own teachings, and to require agreement with them as a condition of membership in it and participation in its sacred mysteries.

If a person doesn't believe what the Catholic Church believes, he (or she) shouldn't be a Catholic. To remain a member of a church whose teachings one rejects is to be a hypocrite, to confess through one's church affiliation and religious practice what he or she denies in his or her heart. Historically, to commune at a Christian altar is to confess oneness of faith with that confessed at the altar at which one communes. Granted, that point has been lost in most Protestant traditions, in which for philosophical reasons I won't get into here the Sacraments are taken somewhat less seriously than in Catholicism (my own Lutheran tradition is an exception, although denominations calling themselves Lutheran have for some time been departing from that tradition in this and in a great many other things).

Further, far from being loveless, in light of I Corinthians 11, denying communion to someone in a state of willful and unrepented sin is precisely an act of charity, since according to Paul to do so is to receive it, not to one's blessing, but to one's spiritual harm. Biblically, there are few things as callous and unloving as open Communion!

I can understand, given the mixed signals being sent out not only by Pope Francis and liberal Catholics but by "progressive" Protestant denominations which breezily ignore Scripture and what the Christian faith has consistently taught for two millennia when they conflict with modern sensibilities, why outsiders might be confused about what the teachings of the Christian faith are. I can certainly understand that in an age of biblical illiteracy such as ours, people become confused when liberal scholars and theologians come up with elaborate and generally unconvincing arguments that the Christian tradition has only thought that it taught thus and so all this time when the biblical texts actually meant something far different from... well, what they say. People who are either unaware of what those texts say or who don't care, valuing the consensus of society or their own personal preferences more than what they regard as divine revelation, sort of, or something, can hardly be blamed when they don't understand stuff like this.

I've referred before to the strange, unconscious confusion shared by the worst-informed conservative Christians and sexual "progressives" on an important point. Neither group seems to be aware that the concept of "sexual orientation" is only about a hundred years old. Neither the Bible nor the writings of the Church Fathers nor of the Reformers nor the Church Councils even address the issue of sexual orientation. But they do discuss homosexual behavior, and what they have to say about it is unanimously and consistently negative (while there is some disagreement about the translation of the words μαλακοί and ἀρσενοκοίτης in I Corinthians 2:6, dissent from the traditional understanding that they refer to male homosexual behavior tends to come pretty much from those determined to exclude Paul's own background and theology, including what he has to say in Romans 1: 26-28, from consideration and is generally unconvincing to anyone else).

Christianity, both biblically and historically, is about as close to being unanimous in declaring homosexual behavior (not orientation) to be a sin as it can be. Though some churches and theologians are abandoning the historical teaching of the Bible and the Faith on the matter, the voice of Christianity down through the ages has been clear and unmistakable on that point. The judge is not only living in a lesbian "marriage" (as always, I use quotation marks when referring to same-sex marriage as considered from a Christian theological viewpoint because from such a viewpoint the term is an oxymoron).

Somehow, notions of what is "loving" based on sentiment rather than Scripture and notions of "inclusivity" seem in the minds of some to be more basic criteria for Christian doctrine and practice than the Bible and the specific content of the Christian faith as the Church expresses it. And in an age in which Communion is seen even by many who ought to know better as a purely private act between the communicant and God (while in fact, it's also an intensely corporate act, seen throughout history as well as in the New Testament as a statement of unity with the others with whom one communes and with the larger body of believers), the inclination not only of the media but of most individuals these days (including Catholics, Lutherans, and other Christians who ought to know better), exalts sentimentality over substance and leads many to treat the idea that those who are not within the unity to which the Sacrament gives public witness ought not to pretend that they are, or to be treated as if they are, is foreign and alien

They shouldn't. It's finally nothing but the question of whether hypocrisy is a good or a bad thing.

Nobody has a right to Communion. By definition, it's a gift, a privilege rather than a right, a grace extended precisely to those who do not deserve it. But the Giver does require that it be received as an act by which one confesses one's unity in faith with those with whom one communes, and that it not be received by one in open rebellion against Him.

He has charged His Church with the obligation to refrain from harming the souls of those who wish to receive it on other terms. One doesn't have to agree with the basis upon which it performs that duty, or even to see its performance of that duty as a duty, to understand the real issue here.

It's whether our own hearts or divine revelation get to define what is "loving." And it's whether the Catholic Church or any church or religious tradition has the right to practice its corporate faith according to the tenets of that faith, as opposed to what some individual within its visible fellowship or outside of it thinks those tenets ought to be.

It's whether the Catholic church has the right to be Catholic, the Lutheran Church Lutheran, or the Christian Church Christian, as each of those expressions of the Church defines itself.

Nobody has a right to remain a member of a religious denomination with whose teachings he or she openly rejects, and which he or she declines to practice. And nobody has a right to be treated by them as members in good standing if they do. The critics of the priests and bishops involved either do not understand the issue or don't care.

Or both.