Vatican document suggests excommunication
for some Catholic politicians
By Phil Lawler
catholicculture.org
Aug 04, 2017
This week the Vatican launched an international campaign against corruption and organized crime. Well, that’s not quite right. This week the Vatican
announced the campaign; it will actually be launched in September. So we don’t know exactly what it will be.
If you read the full announcement, released on August 2 by the Dicastery for Integral Human Development, you’ll notice that the statement is short on specifics. There will be an “international consultation group,” which will promote education and public awareness of the damage done by corruption. So far, so good. But who will be the members of this group, and what will they actually do?
“The consultation group will not just come up with virtuous exhortations, because concrete gestures are needed,” we are told. Excellent. And what might those “concrete gestures” be?
The announcement offers just one suggestion: a discussion of excommunication as a penalty for corruption or for involvement in the Mafia.
Is the excommunication of prominent individuals a realistic possibility in the age of Pope Francis? Could the canonical penalty actually deter corruption?
Let’s stipulate that corruption is a very serious problem. The problem is typically most acute in impoverished societies, for three reasons. - First, because kleptocratic rulers steal from their people and even siphon off a portion of the humanitarian aid their countries receive. - Second, because endemic corruption impedes economic development; investors shy away from countries where the rules can change abruptly at the whim of a greedy government official.
- Third, because poor people lack the resources they would need to fight against public corruption.
Corruption in government is a form of oppression; it’s no coincidence that corruption is most evident in authoritarian regimes.
So it is not illogical to suggest that the Church should treat public corruption as a serious offense: a grave sin and scandal.
However, in order to punish corruption, Church leaders would first need to prove corruption. Therein lies a difficulty. We might all feel sure that a particular government leader is corrupt, and we might all be right.
But canon law, like secular law, requires proof before a penalty can be imposed. How would an ecclesiastical court acquire that sort of proof?
It would be simple enough, I suppose, if a venal politician called a press conference to boast about his acceptance of bribes and kickbacks. But that isn’t likely. (The same is true for Mafia dons, who typically identify themselves to the public as legitimate businessmen. Don Corleone wouldn’t be excommunicated for importing olive oil.)
And yet…Wait a minute!
- Haven’t more than a few prominent Catholic politicians held press conferences to announce their support for unrestricted legal abortion on demand?
- Haven’t they been amply warned that support for legal abortion is gravely wrong, and separates them from the Church to which they protest their fidelity?
If there’s any argument to be made for the excommunication of corrupt politicians, there’s a stronger argument for excommunication of Catholic politicians who support abortion.
Somehow I doubt that the Dicastery for Integral Human Development, under its present leadership, will pursue that argument. Just as, frankly, I doubt that the dicastery will produce anything more than a
pro forma denunciation of corrupt politicians.
[Does anyone really expect such excommunications to happen? First, the dicastery that says so has no competence to deci'de who may be excommunicated or not. Also, pro-abortion 'Catholic' politicians in the USA have been piously receiving Communion all this almost near-century since the Second World War - believing like unrepentant Bergoglian remarried divorcees (aka adulterers by Jesus's own definition), that they are really in a state of grace
But the bishops of Colombia, with full hue and cry, recently did excommunicate, on the grounds of 'heresy and schism', 88-year-old Professor Jose Galat who had the temerity to declare publicly he does not believe Bergoglio is a legitimate pope. He is, of course, objectively wrong, but it is his opinion, which does not constitute a crime. (A circumstance that the Colombian bishops probably considered aggravating is that Galat owns an influential media empire and has been broadcasting his anti-Bergoglio opinions on his own TV program.)
By the same token, should Benedict XVI have re-excommunicated FSSPX Bishop Williamson after his statements denying, or at the very least, minimizing the Holocaust became known to him? Like Professor Galat, Williamson is objectively wrong, but no one gets excommunicated for historical ignorance, feigned or real.
And while we are at it, by the same criterion as that applied to Prof. Galat, though to a worst degree, the Church (never under Bergoglio, though) could have excommunicated all the Vatican-II progressivists who insisted repeatedly, orally and in writing, that Vatican-II gave birth to a new church!
But no US bishop has even dared excommunicate the likes of Nancy Pelosi or Ted Kennedy in his time, and I can think of only a couple of bishops who, in recent times, upheld their right to withhold communion from a known pro-abortion Catholic politician.
And what would the Dicastery for Integral Human Development think of Bergoglio's staunch defense and fulsome praise for Italy's Grande Dame of Abortion, Emma Bonino - saying textually he is aware of her record "but you must look at what she does!" (What she does in this case, being to advocate mass acceptance of all immigrants, which, in Bergoglio's mind, cancels out the fact that she performed 10,000 abortions herself and midwifed the law that legalized abortion in Italy! You might want to add this to the mini-encyclopedia of Bergoglian statements and gestures that prove he does not sincerely oppose abortion.
Besides, if Bergoglio's Vatican makes such noises - usually it's all bark and no bite - about corrupt politicians, why can it not start by simply dismissing all the Curial personnel Bergoglio accuses every so often of ineptitude, incompetence and spiritual Alzheimer's? It's been more than four years, but the only Curial dismissals we have been told about are of people Bergoglio does not like for one reason or another. Was he not supposed to clean out the Augean stables of the Vatican? On the contrary, he seems to have contributed to the filth by bringing in as close associates persons who would not pass the test for Caesar's wife (i.e., to be above suspicion of anything untoward). Do Mons. Ricca and Fr James Martin, for example, pass the test?]
