Eucharistic coherence, round 2?

Could Senator JD Vance be at the center of a new 'Eucharistic coherence' debate?

Presidential candidate Donald Trump is expected to announce soon his vice-presidential pick for the 2024 campaign against President Joe Biden. 

The announcement could come as soon as Saturday, reports say, or Trump might wait until the Republican National Convention next week.

Senator JD Vance speaks at a rally for Donald Trump. Credit: JD Vance for Senate.

When Trump does pick his running mate, the announcement could set off a Catholic controversy that would have been unexpected four years ago, when Trump left office celebrated by pro-life activists for the judicial appointments that eventually saw Roe vs. Wade overturned. 

That’s because Trump’s selection of a 2024 running mate could begin another round of debate about “Eucharistic coherence,” and Catholic politicians.

—
According to most news reports, the finalists on Trump’s vice-presidential shortlist are North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum, Florida Senator Marco Rubio, and Ohio Senator JD Vance. Some of those potential candidates have been criticized for their recent approaches to Trump’s policies on abortion.

Burgum is reportedly not Catholic. On abortion he has been criticized by Trump for signing into law this April a state law that prohibits abortion in nearly all cases — a decision that Trump has called “a little bit of an issue,” seemingly in terms of Burgum’s electability in states leaning pro-choice.

Rubio, who is Catholic, has long advocated against abortion from his position in the Senate. In 2015, when Rubio was running for the Republican presidential nomination, the politician said that “all human life is worthy of protection, irrespective of the circumstances in which that human life was created.”

While he also said he’d accept legislation that included exceptions to abortion prohibitions in the cases of rape and incest, the senator made clear that he opposes legal protection for abortion in all cases, arguing that, from his vantage point, “all human life is worthy of the protection of our laws. I do. And I believe that irrespective of the conditions by which that life was conceived or anything else.”

In January, Rubio proposed a strategy for Republicans to advocate limits to abortion, while working to protect “the unalienable right to life,” calling that the “deeply moral mission of protecting the unborn.”

In recent weeks, Rubio has endorsed Trump’s move to take the prospect of a federal ban on abortion out of the Republican party platform. 

“Our platform has to reflect our nominee, and our nominee’s position happens to be one grounded in reality,” Rubio said this month. 

“The reality of it is that the Supreme Court overturned Roe vs. Wade and what that basically means is that now it’s not states, [but]  it’s voters, in individual states, who will decide how and to what level they want to restrict abortion, if at all.”

While Rubio has faced ample criticism from some pro-life advocates for his position, the idea that abortion should be regulated by states has long been proposed both by bishops and many pro-life advocates themselves, as they fought to overturn Roe vs. Wade. 

And the senator’s judgment on the matter — that abortion should be regulated by states, not the federal government, would seem a matter of prudential judgment on which Catholics can disagree, mostly about the proper place for abortion prohibition — even while the Church does teach directly that “a law which would admit in principle the liceity of abortion is in itself immoral.” 

—
Ohio Senator JD Vance, also a Catholic, has also indicated his support for the Republican decision to drop its advocacy for a federal abortion ban from the party platform.

But in a July 7 interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Vance went further than that. 

Twice, the Ohio senator told an interviewer that he supports legal protection for access to mifepristone, which according to the USCCB, is the effective cause of “over half of abortions in the U.S.”

The pill works, according to the bishops’ conference, by causing “damage [to] a woman’s uterine lining, cutting off nutrition and oxygen to her pre-born child, causing starvation and suffocation.”

Vance faced questions about mifepristone because of a June decision from the Supreme Court, Food and Drug Administration v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, in which the court decided that the plaintiff, the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, did not have standing to challenge the FDA’s approval of the abortifacient drug.

For its part, the bishops’ conference said after the decision that “The court’s ruling late last week on procedural grounds does not change the fact that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration repeatedly and unlawfully cut corners to put chemical abortion pills on the market and then to reduce the safety protocols around them – putting the health of women and girls at risk.”

Vance’s support for access to the drug, which he referred to as “the abortion pill,” puts him at odds with the bishops’ conference, which has frequently said that the FDA should not have approved an abortifacient drug, and that its decision should be reversed. 

This puts Vance in an unusual, though familiar, circumstance: While the senator has previously expressed his opposition to abortion, he now apparently stands in favor of legal protection for the process which causes more than half of abortions in the United States, answer directly that he supports the legal accessibility of mifepristone. 

In the past, a cadre of U.S. bishops have said that politicians who are “personally opposed” to abortion, but supportive of its legal protection, ought eventually be denied Holy Communion, especially if they advocate for funding or legislative protection of that abortion.

In fact, that perspective, citing canon 915 of the Code of Canon Law, fueled the sharp “Eucharistic coherence” debates among the U.S. bishops in 2020 and 2021.

Ultimately, after a significant number of bishops expressed directly that politicians advocating for the legal protection of abortion should not be admitted to Holy Communion, the bishops approved a document which made reference to the topic, but was not explicit on abortion.

“In cases of outward conduct which is seriously, clearly and steadfastly contrary to the moral norm, the Church, in her pastoral concern for the good order of the community and out of respect for the sacrament, cannot fail to feel directly involved. The Code of Canon Law refers to this situation of a manifest lack of proper moral disposition when it states that those who ‘obstinately persist in manifest grave sin’ are not to be admitted to Eucharistic communion,” the bishops wrote, quoting from Pope St. John Paul II’s Ecclesia de Eucharistia.

“It is the special responsibility of the diocesan bishop to work to remedy situations that involve public actions at variance with the visible communion of the Church and the moral law. Indeed, he must guard the integrity of the sacrament, the visible communion of the Church, and the salvation of souls,” the U.S. bishops added.

To date, Vance has not actually done anything to advocate for funding or legislative protection of mifepristone, nor elaborated on the position he took on “Meet the Press.” And in truth, Vance is probably not the first politician to say he personally opposes abortion, while supporting legal access to abortifacient pharmaceuticals. 

But Vance has directly stated that the drug should be legally accessible, in contrast to the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith’s direction on abortion’s legality — and he’s so done after a share of U.S. bishops staked quite a bit of their moral authority on a commitment to “Eucharistic coherence.”

Still, a few comments on “Meet the Press” hardly meet the standard of “steadfast” conduct.  

But if the issue continues to come up, and Trump dispatches Vance to be its spokesman, the question of scandal could eventually be raised during the course of the presidential campaign — at least by some Catholics. 

Others, because the GOP’s position does not involve federal funding for abortion, as the Democrats’ does, will be inclined to argue that the party’s candidates remain the pro-life option, and therefore should not face sacramental discipline, despite stated support for access to an abortifacient which causes half of American abortions. In short, it could soon be Republican Catholics, not Democrats, arguing that bishops would be unreasonable to propose a measure of Eucharistic discipline for a politician they regard as the most Catholic option.

Nevertheless, amid fractious debate among pro-lifers, some observers will certainly ask, if it becomes the case that a Republican vice-presidential candidate frequently defends without qualification the legality of a direct abortifacient, whether what’s good for the goose is good for the gander. 

And bishops who have been outspoken on pro-choice Catholic politicians like President Joe Biden and Rep. Nancy Pelosi, will have to decide whether to make the same interventions for a candidate who is associated with the traditionally anti-abortion political party, after years of emphasizing the importance of “Eucharistic coherence,” and insisting that the issue was not a matter of partisan affiliation. 

While denial of the Eucharist is not the first step for a politician supportive of legal protection for abortion, it is, many U.S. bishops have said, a step that should eventually be taken — and be preceded by stern, serious, and direct warnings.

Ultimately, as the USCCB taught, that decision is a matter for the Archdiocese of Cincinnati, where Vance lives, and which told The Pillar this week it has no comment on the question.

But if Vance is the vice-presidential nominee, and if abortion remains a topic on the campaign trail, there could soon be another, and very different, round of Catholic conversation about Eucharistic coherence and pro-choice politicians.