WASHINGTON, June 30, 2021 (LifeSiteNews) — The parish council at historic Holy Trinity Catholic Church, the Jesuit-run parish where President Joe Biden normally attends Sunday Mass, has issued a statement declaring that their church “will not deny the Eucharist to persons presenting themselves to receive it.”
The parish declaration is clearly a response to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ (USCCB) stated intention to draft a formal statement on the Eucharist addressing Church teaching on worthiness to receive Holy Communion, which will bear upon the reception of the Eucharist by pro-abortion Catholic politicians.
While a parish council has no authority over the distribution and conferral of the sacraments, the parish’s Jesuit pastor’s continued silence signals his agreement with the council’s proclamation.
“We stand with our Archbishop, Cardinal Wilton Gregory, concerning the issues surrounding offering the Eucharist to American politicians,” begins the brief dispatch. The Washington, D.C., archbishop is one of several outspoken U.S. prelates who have decried the USCCB’s move to protect the Eucharist from being received unworthily.
The parish council’s declaration continues:
Cardinal Gregory serves as one of the most prominent ecclesiastical leaders in the current controversy and so it was therefore shocking and disappointing that his request to postpone the draft of portions of this document about the Eucharist received the minority of votes among the bishops. As Cardinal Gregory stated in the discussions leading up to the vote, “The strength of our voice in advancing the mission of Christ has been seriously weakened.” Sadly, the recent vote has caused considerable desolation among our parishioners as well as Roman Catholics throughout the nation.
Despite the protestations by Cardinals Gregory, Blase Cupich, and Joseph Tobin, the USCCB voted to move ahead with the effort by a wide margin, 168-55.
The foreignness of Biden’s ‘Catholicism’ to faithful Catholics
President Biden adheres to a brand of Catholicism that is foreign to faithful Catholics. He has made it clear that he embraces abortion and sodomy — as Vice President, he conducted a same-sex “wedding” — and has promised to squash religious liberty and conscience rights via the Equality Act.
After Biden attended Mass at Washington’s Cathedral of St. Matthew on the morning of his inauguration, Austin Ruse, the president of the Center for Family and Human Rights (C-FAM), wrote:
Joe Biden ate and drank his own spiritual death. That he received the Holy Eucharist from the hands of a Cardinal of the Church adds scandal upon scandal. One radio wag called it a [M]ass for Planned Parenthood. And so, it was.
And yet Holy Trinity Parish decided to continue the scandal.
Holy Trinity: The perfect parish for Biden’s brand of ‘Catholicism’
Located just outside Georgetown University’s main gate and ensconced in the fashionable neighborhood by the same name, Holy Trinity is arguably the most effete liberal Catholic parish in the Archdiocese of Washington, drawing well-heeled Catholic elites — who deem their own neighborhood parishes too “conservative” or too “rigid” — from wealthy suburbs around the city.
Earlier this year, the parish proclaimed its support for Black Lives Matter, a Marxist organization that aims to “disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure” and that demands abortion “rights.”
It’s also a place where someone like Father James Martin, S.J. — the chief promoter of the normalization of homosexuality and transgenderism within U.S. Catholicism — can count on receiving a standing ovation from a church packed with adoring fans.
In March, when the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued a statement declaring that the Catholic Church cannot bless homosexual relationships, the Holy Trinity “LGBTQIA+ Ministry” published a rebuke.
“Unequivocally, Holy Trinity affirms that LGBTQIA+ individuals have and always will have a valued place in our parish community,” asserted the parish’s homosexual, transgender, intersex, and asexual supporters. “To our LGBTQIA+ friends, we want to stress that Holy Trinity is enriched by your presence, ministry and leadership.”
The most liberal parish in a very liberal archdiocese
Holy Trinity is a bastion of fringe liberal Catholicism in an archdiocese that for the last two decades has been led by ultra-liberal prelates who have exhibited varying degrees of complicit behavior regarding homosexuality, transgenderism, and abortion.
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Theodore McCarrick, formerly Cardinal Archbishop of Washington from 2001 to 2006, was stripped of the clerical state for crimes against minors and adults, with no possibility for appeal. McCarrick’s most well-known victim, James Grein, described how McCarrick abused him for years starting when he was 11 years old. Other alleged victims included former seminarians and priests who have detailed the sexual abuse to which McCarrick subjected them.
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Cardinal Donald Wuerl, who led the archdiocese from 2006 to 2018, downplayed his predecessor’s culpability and publicly pretended not to know about the many allegations against McCarrick. A Pennsylvania Grand Jury also found that while Wuerl was bishop of Pittsburgh, he allowed predatory priests to remain in active ministry, shuffling them between dioceses and parishes.
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Washington’s current archbishop, Wilton Gregory — elevated to the rank of cardinal by Pope Francis last fall — as archbishop of Atlanta displayed an uncritical willingness to accept LGBT ideology in defiance of the Church’s Magisterium. Soon after arriving in D.C., he tacitly affirmed the transgenderism of a “transgender Catholic” at a public event. He condemned President and Mrs. Trump’s visit to the city’s John Paul II National Shrine to pray on the occasion of Pope St. John Paul II’s 100th birthday.