The Catholic bishops of the United States routinely meet as a national conference to decide things as brothers. The purpose of these meetings, officially, is to help them advance the Gospel of Jesus Christ, to help sinners find love and redemption in the boundless mercy of God. Literally to help souls get to heaven. What they actually do is produce endless documents, usually about politics. Most of the documents are at pains to present the bishops collectively as nonpartisan. Oh, you may think of us as antediluvian right-wingers on abortion, but have you seen our latest circulars on immigration, foreign aid, or the death penalty? These documents have the quality that almost all documents produced by tiny subcommittees have: They are unreadable, verging on meaningless.
But this year they voted to come up with a document that might, maybe just sort of, address the awkward problem that the president of the United States, Joe Biden, who is a tireless and public proponent of looser abortion laws, is a frequent Catholic communicant. This caused outrage among non-Catholics and progressive Catholics. Why? Because it implied something that no other document produced by this congress of clerics does: action. It implied just the faintest whiff of a possibility that the successors to the Apostles might acknowledge for the first time in living memory that they have authority granted to them by Christ to discipline a member of the Church.
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