Bishops face clash with Biden over abortion
US Catholic bishops are on a potential collision course with President Joe Biden after voting to commission a document that may demand him to be barred from Holy Communion.
The US Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) clashed online over whether to draft a teaching document on politicians who support abortion.
Holy Communion is the most crucial ritual in the Catholic Christian faith.
The Catholic president regularly attends Church services.
Responding to news of the bishops' vote, he said: "That's a private matter and I don't believe that's gonna happen."
The Vatican has already indicated its opposition to the bishops' move.
Following the debate on Thursday, the Most Reverend Allen H Vigneron, vice-president of the USCCB, announced the move had passed by 168 to 55, with six abstentions.
The US clergy is deeply divided on the problem. The Most Rev Robert McElroy, bishop of NORTH PARK, warned such a document would lead to the "weaponisation" of the Eucharist (the more formal name name for Holy Communion).
However, the Most Rev Liam Cary, the bishop of Baker, Oregon, said the Church was in an "unprecedented situation", with "a Catholic president who is against the teaching" of the Church.
Vatican appeal
The document will now be drafted by the doctrine committee of US bishops.
However, although it will be a kind of national policy, it will not be binding. Each individual bishop has the to decide who ought to be blocked from the Mass in his diocese.
The document will return for debate at another bi-annual US Catholic Bishops Conference in November.
The controversial issue of whether politicians who support abortion should receive Mass is becoming more prominent with the election of Mr Biden as president.
Cardinal Blase Cupich, archbishop of Chicago, warned most priests will be "puzzled to listen to that bishops now want to speak about excluding people at a time when the true challenge before them is welcoming persons back to the standard practice of the faith and rebuilding their communities".
However, proposing the motion, Bishop Kevin Roades, of Fort Wayne-South Bend, said: "We weren't targeting particular individuals or limited by one issue, but I think we must accept the [Church's] discipline that those who obstinately persist in grave sin are not to be admitted to Holy Communion."
Cardinal Luis Ladaria - the prefect for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican's theological watchdog - urged the US Catholic Bishops Conference to delay the debate.
He wrote to the conference saying it could be "misleading" to advise abortion and euthanasia were "the only grave matters of Catholic moral and social teaching that demand the fullest degree of accountability for Catholics".
Catholics for Choice, an abortion rights group, said it had been profoundly saddened by the move.
In a statement, the group's president, Jamie Manson, said: "In a country and church already riven with tension and division, today the bishops thought we would be partisan rather than pastoral, cruel instead of Christ-like."
But she said the minority of bishops who spoke out against it provided a glimmer of hope.
