Welcome to Wednesday. NCR columnist Michael Sean Winters says an archbishop's opinion on giving President-elect Joe Biden Communion can divide the episcopacy. A new study says that neither immigration nor abortion are important political priorities for Latinos in Texas. And the incoming Biden administration is likely to focus more on climate change, a move, writes an NCR columnist, that should be celebrated by Catholics.
In a recent article at First Things, Charles Chaput, emeritus archbishop of Philadelphia, opined about the impending scandal that President-elect Joe Biden might be given Communion.
Chaput recalls the 2004 election in which another Catholic, Sen. John Kerry, ran for president and some bishops argued that Kerry be denied Communion because of his support for liberal abortion laws.
"Why, if he truly believes there are times denial of Communion is pastorally unwise," asks NCR political columnist Michael Sean Winters, "is Chaput so quick to be championing the cause now that Biden is headed to the White House, when he is neither the pastor of the church of Wilmington, Delaware, nor the pastor of the church of Washington, D.C.?"
"Maybe half the church is scandalized by this, but the other half has been scandalized by the failure of the bishops to confront the many, many moral failings of the Trump administration with the kind of forceful language they routinely use against Democrats," Winters writes. "And we all should be scandalized by an episcopal conference that has let itself become so divided that their boss, Pope Francis, had to tell them to take some time away from their meetings and go pray together."
Read more of Winters' column here.
Neither immigration nor abortion were the top political priority in 2020 for most Latinos in Texas, anthropologist and writer Cecilia Ballí said in an Instagram Live talk hosted last week by The Texas Tribune.
In a nonpartisan study she helped conduct for the Texas Organizing Project, a progressive grassroots campaign to mobilize Black and Latino Texans, Ballí said she found that issues such as the economy, jobs, education and health care were more important to many Latinos in the state.
Mainstream media and political parties underestimate Texas Latinos' political diversity, agency and independence, portraying their political behavior through simplistic, sometimes racist tropes, Ballí said.
"At a national level, we imagine Latinos as purely immigrants or children of immigrants — basically one-dimensional voters that have one interest: immigration," Ballí said. "That's the only time Latino voters get engaged — a party needs the Latino vote and they put out an immigration policy proposal."
Aside from a subset of evangelical and mainline Protestant voters and a few Catholics, most of the people she and her colleagues interviewed for the study didn't prioritize abortion policies, either. Latino Catholics, Ballí said, tended to be less focused on abortion than their evangelical and mainline Protestant peers.
You can read more on the study here.
More headlines
- The incoming Biden administration is offering us a small sliver of pro-life hope when it comes to climate change, writes Franciscan Fr. Daniel Horan. That should be supported and celebrated by Catholics.
- ICYMI: Oneness with earth, water and sky is an audiovisual motif that runs throughout the documentary "maɬni — towards the ocean, towards the shore," raising a subversive mirror to our consumerist culture.
Final thoughts
Yesterday, Pope Francis decreed a special year dedicated to St. Joseph, offering an opportunity to obtain indulgences as the world continues to undergo the "grave tribulation" of the coronavirus pandemic. In the papal letter, the pope compares Joseph, Jesus' foster father, to the many unheralded essential workers keeping society afloat in times of social distancing and remote work.
Until Thursday,
Stephanie Yeagle
NCR Production/Online Editor
[email protected]
Twitter: @ncrSLY
