For progressives, “separation of church and state” means that religious believers must forgo all attempts to influence what the state does. Secular believers have no corresponding duty to refrain from demanding that the church submit to their preferences. Accordingly, leftists are loudly condemning the Roman Catholic Archbishop of San Francisco, the Most Rev. Salvatore Cordileone, for directing the priests in his diocese to refuse the sacrament of communion to Nancy Pelosi. Whoopi Goldberg, whose theological expertise derives from playing a nun in the movies, said of the Archbishop’s action, “This is not your job, dude.” Other progressive voices were less calm and restrained.
The San Francisco Examiner forthrightly demanded that Pope Francis sack the archbishop for holding and propagating opinions that deviate from progressive orthodoxy. The church, it declares, ought to be “a place that welcomes people of all political backgrounds and all faiths” (emphasis added).
There’s half a truth in that statement; no one should be told that he is so sin-ridden that he can never be a Christian. But the other half is that the essential precondition for membership in the Body of Christ is acceptance of the doctrines of the Faith, and Holy Communion is, for Roman Catholics and other Christians, no mere gesture signifying self-identification with the church. Rather, it has tremendous consequences for the soul. As the Orthodox prayer before partaking the sacrament expresses it, “May the communion of thy holy mysteries be neither to my judgment nor to my condemnation, O Lord, but to the healing of soul and body.”
Archbishop Cordileone would not object to Speaker Pelosi’s lighting a candle or kissing an icon or joining in coffee hour after mass, but he is mindful of the fact that those who receive the sacrament risk “judgment” and “condemnation” if they partake it while alienated from the Faith. From his point of view, keeping an impenitent advocate of abortion away from communion is no more a punishment than keeping a child’s hand away from the fire.
The Speaker obviously sees matters entirely differently. She has made clear her belief that abortion in a fundamental human right and has exerted all of her political power to turn that belief into the law of the land. In doing so, she disagrees with Christian teaching that dates back to the earliest period of church history. In the Epistle of Barnabas, written around the end of the First Century A.D., one reads, “You shall not slay the child by procuring abortion; nor, again, shall you destroy it after it is born.” Slightly later, Athenagoras of Athens, a philosopher who had converted to Christianity, writes that Christians “regard the very fetus in the womb as a created being, and therefore an object of God's care” and “say that those women who use drugs to bring on abortion commit murder, and will have to give an account to God for the abortion”. Indeed, in all the writing of all the Church Fathers, one can find not just no favorable word about abortion but nary a neutral one.
To the Caesaropapists of the Left, the Fathers are just a bunch of dead white males (probably racists) whose opinions are entitled to no deference even within the church cloisters. When someone like Archbishop Cordileone deprecates killing small, innocent human beings, he fails, according to his detractors, to realize that those beings may belong to “populations that we don't want to have too many of”, and he inadequately honors the progressive-secular doctrine that adult and adolescent humans have an absolute right to dispose of the lives of infants until at least the moment of birth.
Progressives are here a mirror image of theocrats. One would purge Christian doctrine from the Christian church, the other make it paramount in secular politics. The essence of “separation of church and state” is that both are wrong, that we should address all issues using the tools appropriate for them. Political authorities can’t be expected to bow to the naked ipse dixit of ecclesiastical authority, nor do Christians expect them to. The pro-life position rests on two fundamental principles: that unborn children are human beings and that killing human beings, except in very limited circumstances, is morally wrong. Those are principles that are widely agreed outside the ranks of churchgoers.
By contrast, Whoopi Goldbeg and the San Francisco Examiner believe that the church has no right to limit its holiest mysteries to those who accept the truth of Christianity. “Welcome all faiths” means nothing more than “Stop practicing you own”.
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