And let the rampaging Anti-Catholicism begin. . .

From, Klansman, Guardian of Liberty, by Alma Birdwell White.

It was only a matter of time.

Trump’s likely RBG replacement, Amy Coney Barrett, is a Catholic extremist with 7 children who does not believe employers should be required to provide healthcare coverage for birth control. She wants the rest of American women to be stuck with her extreme lifestyle.

Documentarian Arlen Parsa.* **

Anti Catholicism has been termed the last acceptable prejudice in the United States and there's a great deal of merit to that claim.  In certain quarters, anymore, there's a subtle to not so subtle anti Christian prejudice in general that people express more or less openly, however, so to at least some degree that statement isn't fully true.  And its certainly the case that people will openly express disdain to some religions in some regions.  The LDS faith, for example, is often a topic of some disdain on the margins of its territories.  Islam is definitely subject to widespread public disdain in the United States.***

The thing that's really different about anti Catholicism, however, is the degree to which its visceral and blisteringly open.****  Additionally, it's rooted in falsehoods of the Reformation even as its advanced by those who reject all strong tenants of Christianity in general, even if it's in their ancestral background.  Descendants of Puritans and near Puritans, whose ancestors hated Catholic based on lies that were told by the founders of their faiths in order to justify separation from the only body of Christianity that had existed continually since the First Century, still hate Catholics or disdain them in spite of the fact that they've often completely shed the religions that gave rise to their beliefs.

The United States is really a Protestant country in culture, although that culture has weakened massively in urban areas.  The retained belief, however, is that Catholics are a dangerous "other" to be feared, believing in strange dangerous beliefs.  That's about to come out in public in spades.

Observant Apostolic Christians continue to believe in a religion that's Christ centric in the way that Christianity was from its onset.  A significant aspect of that is a belief that God's laws are immutable and his Church hierarchical in aid of that.  All Apostolic Christians, including the Orthodox of every branch and all types of Catholics, if they are observant, hold that.  The essence of the Reformation rejected that, although even the first rebels against the Church in the Reformation actually didn't, or didn't at first.  Even today, five centuries after the Reformation, some Protestant churches worry about Apostolic succession, still viewing it as necessary to their authority.

Because Catholics, as Apostolic Christians, hold that, it has always been used against them in those European cultural regions where the churches of the Reformation were strong.  In English speaking countries, even though the Church of England and the Anglican Communion claim Apostolic succession, it's always been a way to vilify Catholics.  In part this was because of the English Established Church's strong animosity towards Catholicism and in part it was because dissenting Protestant English churches took an even more extreme position than the Church of England did. Those latter churches were also heavily invested in concepts of individuality and, moreover, they were very strong in early American history.  Some have claimed, although the claim suffers on analysis, that the individualism of those churches helped give rise to American democracy.

While that claim is strained at best, it has become the American Civil Religion that there's no inconsistency in holding your religion close to your heart but not acting upon it in public.  American Catholic politicians, always held back by prejudice against their faith at the ballot box (but interestingly not so much at the Supreme Court, where they'd been a presence since the middle of the 19th Century), adopted that view with John F. Kennedy's declaration that:

I am not the Catholic candidate for President [but a candidate] who happens also to be a Catholic. I do not speak for my church on public matters — and the church does not speak for me.

In retrospect, Kennedy was a pretty bad Catholic in general, but his position was embraced by American Catholics in a way that brought about sweeping changes.Catholic politicians, rapidly followed in Kenney's wake and adopted his formula, rejecting prior Presidential nominee Al Smith's position that:

I do not want any Catholic to vote for me . . . because I am a Catholic. . . . But, on the other hand, I have the right to say that any citizen of this country . . . [who] votes against me because of my religion, he is not a real, pure, genuine American.

Smith didn't walk away from his faith the way that Kennedy did, but thousands of Catholic politicians did to be followed by thousands of rank and file Catholics.  In essence, Kennedy advanced the position that a person's religion only really mattered as to what he did on Sundays.  Smith didn't state that.

A similar view was incorporated into the American Civil Religion after a time which at first came to hold that there general Judeo Christian values that we all agreed on, and what a person did beyond that was their own business, with everything else being co-equal.  This position is of course absurd on its faith.  Religious convictions are an individual's deepest convictions and should inform everything they do.

It's that knowledge that, in some ways, forms the basis for the societal hatred of Catholicism and the spreading disdain for Christianity in general.  It isn't that Christians in general or Catholics in particular "want[] the rest of American women to be stuck with [an] extreme lifestyle".  Rather its that they acknowledge that there's something greater than the individual and that Christians have to pick up their cross and carry it.

Moreover, the real fear isn't that a single Catholic judge is going to somehow impose her values on American society.  Liberals of all stripes, including non observant liberal Catholics, know, or at least should know if they stop to think about it, that not a single conservative judge on the Supreme Court proposed to impose any religious belief on society.  What liberals really fear, and won't acknowledge, is that for jurisprudential reasons, not religious ones, those justices will hold that there's a lot of things the United States Constitution doesn't address and therefore its up to the states to address them.

Nearly all of the recent and old hot button issues in front of the Supreme Court fit into this category.  Indeed, as we've stated elsewhere, there really aren't any jurisprudentially conservative justices on the bench or proposed for it.  That really shows in their approach to these issues.  Abortion is one such issue that is cited all the time, although most typically with the term "a woman's right to choose", by which is meant a person's individual right to choose on a matter of life or death for another person.  A jurisprudentially conservative jurist would hold that life was a matter of natural law, and that no person had the right to decide on matters of life or death for a third person except for individual self defense, a natural law paramount.  That would truly make abortion illegal, irrespective of the Constitution. That's not what a conservative justice of the type who will be on the bench, or who already is, will hold.

That sort of conservative, of which Barrett is part, would instead hold that its just not in the text, and therefore its up to the states.  In terms of supposed deep philosophical statements, that's really weak tea.  Its just being politically and textually conservative. That's it.  Likewise, on the issue of same sex marriage, the conservative justices simply dissented that it wasn't in the text.  They didn't opine on the nature of marriage in an existential or metaphysical or even biological sense.

Given that, the real fear on the part of liberals like Parsa and the thousands like him is that his fellow Americans of all stripes might hold the same conservative views.  It isn't that the court is going to make something illegal, it's that the American people will.  That's democracy.  That doesn't fit into a secular world view, however, of radical self definition and a "progressive" world, which most of the world actually rejects, which is even more radical than the anarchist "No Gods, No Master" ideology, as it takes the view of "I'm my own god and own master and nothing else matters".

The knowledge that something else does matter, and we know it, is inside of all of us however.  And that makes most people feel that they have a right to voice an opinion on really important matters rather than have nine elderly men and women of high but limited legal education and liberal values decide those matters for us.^  It isn't really the Catholic hierarchy or dogma that's feared here. The language of the Reformation remains, but it's the spirit of radical individualism in the tone.  What Parsa really meant was he wants American men and women to be stuck with no ability to put their beliefs into practice, both in their own lives and at the ballot.  If Americans, or even American women, the latter of which is the majority of the population, share his views, this presents no threats to those views at all.

One thing we can be assured of, as this matter progresses, is that Senators who previously were openly hostile to Catholicism at the time that Barrett was nominated to assume her current role on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals will struggle not to come across so openly that way again.  Diane Feinstein's blisteringly hostile comment will not be repeated by her, and she's even stated that at least to her, Barrett's religion is off limits.  Kamala Harris, who likewise felt free to make anti Catholic comments during Barrett's prior hearing, will have to be careful lest she damage the campaign she's currently in.  Durbin's petty comments, perhaps inspired by the fact that his Bishop has denied him Communion rights due to his stated positions, may well come back. But the hostility is going to be there just under the surface.  Out in the public and through pundits, it'll be on the surface.

*Parsa is a documentary film maker, but I can't say that he's a well known one, at least to me.  I picked up his quote from an article by C. E. Cupp.

**An interesting aspect of Parsa's bigotry is that he associates large families with conservatism and by extension small or no families with progressivism, although I'll be that in the case of families born out of the United States but which have immigrated into the US, his view is the reverse. At any rate, the question of whether or not an employer can be mandated to pay for health care raises moral questions for Catholics, to be sure, but beyond that it raises other philosophical and fiscal considerations that are completely outside of religion.  Whether or not society at large, for example, through mandated health care, should be required to subsidize individual acts and when they should  is the larger issue.  When a society has strongly divergent beliefs regarding this, it raises further questions pertaining to participatory democracy and such choices.

***Islam presents a challenge to liberals in that the religion can demand strict adherence to its tenants and always demand public observation of them by the faithful.  Indeed it shares that characteristic with the Apostolic Churches and conservative Judaism, in that some of those tenants cannot be ignored by their members.  Muslims may not ignore the daily calls and periods to prayer nor the season of fasting, at a bare minimum, must as members of the Apostolic Churches may not ignore periods of fasting or the obligation to attend Sunday Mass.  Mormons, mentioned in this paragraph, likewise have a series of tenants that they can't ignore or shouldn't ignore.

****In fairness, this is also true of Islam.

Antipathy towards Islam to date has been strongly concentrated in conservative circles, but as the Muslim population increases this is almost certain to present very strong challenges to liberals. Already strongly observant Muslim women are relatively frequent callers into Catholic radio on the topic of abortion, where they'll routinely note that Muslims are opposed to abortion and they seem befuddled that people don't realize that.

In Europe distinct Muslim dietary practices that are shared with Judaism have made Muslims and conservative Jews unlikely allies against laws pertaining to slaughter in some countries.  Moreover, while so far Americans are mostly familiar with Muslim women who have taken the opposite view, conservative Muslims have a strict dichotomy of roles and behavior as to men and women. This has also presented itself in Europe where various nations have attempted to ban Muslim female veiling and headdress.  The challenge in the United States will be to see if American society can accommodate to itself to conservative Islamic practices which fall outside the American norm.

^One of the refreshing things about a Barrett confirmation would be that she's not a graduate of Harvard or Yale, which have had a lock on the Supreme Court for some time.

Communion and the State. Wyoming dictates how the faithful will receive and what that reveals about what people understand and don't understand.

St. Mary's Cathedral in Cheyenne, Wyoming.

We've been unusually active here in an unusual way, for this blog, since the COVID 19 Pandemic struck.  The reason is obvious.  Churches, like every other institution, have been greatly impacted by the Pandemic.

Well, not like every other institution.  While its seemingly easy for some to forget, including civil authorities, a church isn't like a restaurant or a bar or something, and particularly depending upon a person's faith, the closure of religious services, and services mean more than just a Sunday gathering, can not only be problematic, but traumatic, and even dire, in their consequences.

This is particularly so for the Apostolic Churches, those being, for those who might not be familiar with the term, the Catholic and Orthodox Churches.  The Apostolic Churches have a relationship with their clergy that Protestant Christians do not.  Members of the Apostolic faiths depending upon the clergy for administration of the sacraments.  Nobody but an ordained cleric, and more specifically in terms of the Apostolic faiths, a cleric who can trace his ordination through a Bishop who was one of the Apostles, can deliver the sacraments.  We've gone into this elsewhere and will forgo doing so here, but we'd note that the closure of Catholic and Orthodox Churches during the pandemic is, therefore, uniquely problematic for Apostolic Christians.

Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Church, Casper Wyoming.

Those closures are not, contrary to what has been repeatedly claimed during this crisis, fully unparallelled.  Churches were in fact closed during the 1918-1919 Influenza Pandemic, although I do not know for how long.  A review of period newspapers demonstrates this to be the case.  Therefore, those numerous, mostly heavily Traditional, voices that claim "Catholics have never been denied the sacraments" aren't fully correct when they mean that church doors have not been closed due to disease before.  Moreover, while I haven't researched it, I'm fairly confident, just from having run across references here and there, that churches of all types have been closed before due to local pandemics.  Indeed, something we've forgotten, as we always view our own times as fully analogous to the past, is that epidemics were once quite common.

While I don't know the situation in the Orthodox Churches, closures have been controversial, as noted, in some Catholic quarters and have resulted in petitions to Bishops to open things back up. At least for the most part those petitions have not resulted in changes, but churches are now actually beginning to open up.  Some Protestant churches that closed early on have actually reopened in slight defiance, as they're usually only a little bit ahead of changes in local orders, to state quarantine commands.  I think I've read of one Catholic one doing so, and I saw a reference, but didn't follow up on it, to at least one SSPX chapel doing so, although as Catholics know or should know the relationship between the SSPX and the Church is problematic.  At least one diocese in New Mexico did reopen public Masses, and while there was concern, it was not in defiance of a closure order.

Which brings us to Wyoming, which is providing an interesting example of how things may develop and how that could be really odd, if not problematic, for Catholics and Orthodox Christians.

The Catholic and Orthodox Churches recognize seven sacraments, those being baptism, Communion (receiving the Holy Eucharist), confirmation, reconciliation (confession of sins), anointing of the sick, marriage and holy orders. 

The Seven Sacraments, altarpiece, 1450.  Sacraments are depicted being administered, from left to right, are baptism, confirmation, confession, Communion (center panel), holy orders, marriage and anointing of the sick.

The way the sacraments are administered and received is fairly poorly understood by non Catholics as well as Catholics.  Baptism, for example, is a sacrament which the Catholic Church recognizes can be conferred by non Catholics upon non Catholics and which remains perfectly valid.*  A Christian baptized in another church is never "rebaptized" if the person later becomes Catholic and even laymen can validly baptize a person although the baptism is illicit unless done in a dire emergency.

Somewhat similarly, it requires a priest to perform a valid marriage if one of the parties being married is a Catholic, but due to Canon Law, not due to the nature of marriage. The Church didn't always routinely witness marriages but came to do so to protect the parties, particularly the female party.  Now all marriages involving Catholics, with some exceptions, must be performed by a priest, but not all marriages are sacramental, as both parties must be baptized Christians in order for that to occur.

Confirmation in the Latin Rite of the Catholic Church is normally performed by a Bishop, but for the Orthodox and the Eastern Rite its normally administered contemporaneously at baptism by the priest.  Confessions can only be heard by a priest.  Anointing of the sick can likewise only be done by a priest.  Holy Orders, i.e., ordaining of priests and deacons, can only be done by Bishops.

And consecration of the Eucharist can only be done by a priest in the Apostolic Churches.  The same position is taken by those churches closely based on the Apostolic Churches, such as the churches in the Anglican Communion and the Lutheran Church.

Communion in the desert during World War Two. This is likely an Anglican priest, give as these are British soldiers.

All of these churches have a very distinct view of what the Eucharist is, and they believe it is the real body and blood of Christ, not a symbol. They don't all agree on what exactly the nature of Host is, as there's at least a difference in understanding between the Apostolic Churches and the Lutheran Church, and determining what various churches in the Anglican Communion believe is a bit difficult at times, but by and large they all agree that only a priest or pastor can consecrate a Host.

What various Protestant dominions, outside the ones we just mentioned, believe about their communions, and most of them have one, varies, but quite a few simply view it as a symbol.  Many of these have communion only occasionally as a result, with a much different understanding of what is occuring. And, for that matter, the Apostolic Churches and those closely based on it would regard those other churches as unable to validly consecrate a Host in any event, and therefore likewise agree that in those churches, as opposed to in their church, it is a symbol.

Depiction of a Protestant Communion.

Which brings us to the recent order by the Governor of the State of Wyoming.

Wyoming is opening up its churches, with restrictions.  Those provisions are here:

Those are, of course, all the provisions.  The one that brings in our post here is 4(g), which states:

Communion shall be served in individual containers.

The really remarkable thing here is that a state order purports to direct how Communion will be received. 

I'm not a Canon Lawyer, but this provision strikes me as impossible for the Apostolic Churches to comply with.

Indeed, as should be evident by the discussion set out above, Communion, while it happens in every Mass, is a major matter for Apostolic Churches.  Apostolic Churches that aren't in communion with each other have rules about the reception of Communion by members of the other churches.  I.e., Catholic Churches will allow Orthodox Christians to receive Communion in a Catholic Church, but in most places its discouraged so as to not offend the Orthodox. The Orthodox, in contrast, are very reluctant to allow Catholics to receive Communion in their churches and in some cases simply won't allow it.  Neither the Catholic Churches or the Orthodox will allow those outside of the Catholic and Orthodox churches to receive Communion except under specific circumstances.  

Recipients of Communion must not be bearing unforgiven mortal sins.  

At least Catholics are obligated to receive Communion at least once a year, although most receive it much more frequently than that, and some daily.  Most adherent Orthodox are like most Catholics and receive it weekly.

The method of reception of the Holy Eucharist is very prescribed and actually subject to debate among Catholics.  For most of recent history Latin Rite Catholics, and those Protestants whose faiths are closely based on the Latin Rite, received Communion on the tongue, delivered by the priest.  Up until the 1960s, this usually meant that they received it kneeling at an alter rail with a Communion Plate held below the receiving person to catch the consecrated Host if it was dropped.  Following Vatican II, this was changed as alter rails came out of many churches, a sad development in that many were beautiful works of art, and the communicants then received on the tongue by going up to the priest, receiving standing as a rule.  Starting at some time in the 70s or 80s, actually as an act of odd disobedience to the rubics, Catholics in many places, including the United States, started receiving in the hand, which has become a matter or heated Trad debate.  It is perfectly valid, and as its defenders will note, was the method often used in the early Church, something Trads typically ignore.

Also in the 80s the Latin Rite in North America reintroduced the reception by the parishioners of the consecrated wine, the Precious Blood, although a Catholic is not obligated to receive both forms.  Most do.

In the Eastern Rite and the Orthodox the consecrated bread and wine are mixed and then served, with a tiny spoon that is turned to provide the reception, on the communicants tongue.

There's no earthly way to do this with individual containers.

Indeed, individual containers will strike members of Apostolic Churches as the oddest thought.  It even suggest that the reception  might be taken home, which the Apostolic Churches strictly forbid except in rare specific circumstances.  

So effectively, the Governor of Wyoming has forbid Communion.

I don't know what religion Governor Gordon is.  He want to an Episcopal boarding school while young, but that may mean less than it at first seems. The assumption that a person going to a denomination's school means they are members is a common one, but its never a completely safe assumption.  He and his first wife were married in a Congregationalist Church, which is a church with substantially different theology than the Episcopal Church.  I don't know if that means that he became a member of that church, or if he's a non defined Protestant, something that's very common these days, or if he was and remains an Episcopalian.  

If he is an Episcopalian, his order certainly creates a problem for the traditional branch of his co-religious.  Maybe that doesn't matter to Gordon, who might figure that safety first dictates this approach.  Or maybe he doesn't grasp the religious nature of the topic the way that Catholics and Orthodox will.  Or maybe he's just signing an order, one of a seemingly endless series these days, that come across his desk addressing a lot of topics in a time of crisis.

In any event, it presents an interesting example of how various Christians don't understand each others faiths, and beyond that, it makes Communion impossible for a body of Christians that takes its Sunday obligation extremely seriously.