Attempted Communion Without Consent

I caught an interesting article in USA Today about a week ago. They reported on a Catholic priest’s refusal to grant communion to a lesbian woman at her mother’s funeral and the consequent uproar. But think about it for a minute: who’s the ‘bad guy’ in this situation? Which of the characters is making a political statement? Don’t we automatically believe that the priest was unreasonable? Have some compassion for crying out loud! 

The Catholic Church has to deal with the denial of communion to its parishioners for violations of various moral standards and they have a procedure to deal with such things. From my understanding of communion in the Catholic Church, the parishioners get up from their seats, and move to the front of the church to receive communion from the priest. Parishioners who are guilty of various moral infractions simply remain seated and do not receive communion. So it’s sort of like being the religious guy at the family gathering when all the uncles are going to the bar. We know you’re not going, so we’re not going to ask you if you want to come along. (Notice how I’m playing both sides of that equation?)

With regard to this lesbian woman at her mother’s funeral, we all feel compassion for her loss. But we must also realize that she was the one who initiated the confrontation over communion. She forced the priest to make a decision about serving communion which clearly violated his conscience, requiring him to refuse the cup and wafer. You might even call this a rape of conscience…

Her political statement and the priest’s response is interesting, but it brings to mind something deeper. In society's quest for ‘tolerance’ we see conflicting tensions about ‘social control.’ What’s social control you might ask? In a nutshell, social control is that aspect of a culture which identifies and attempts to correct deviant behavior. In this situation, the woman wanted to publicly call out the man’s deviance, with his crime being that of intolerance. His response was to exercise social control by denying communion. In this situation, (and many others) social control gets applied against ‘older’ societal norms, and particularly matters of Christian conscience, without thinking critically or Biblically about the situation. Without a standard against which to judge our actions, we remain subject to the whims of society, and Christians will become the object of an extreme form of social control: persecution.