HC

Jurist dear Jurist: What is your parish’s position on the denial of Holy Communion to some people some of the time, especially say to politicians?

As a church lawyer we do not comment on spiritual matters for the most part unless there is a real law issue involved, since we are more interested not in an individual’s standing before his conscience as he approaches the altar rails for holy communion, but rather in his or her juristical situation, i.e. whether they are subject to penalties or not for canonical crimes rather than subject to impediments for personal sins of no generalised legal importance.

We are more interested in a communicant’s legal standing in church, do they accept there are 7 Sacraments of the NT, do they accept all 14 Articles of the Nicene Creed, do they maintain good rapports with their church leaders, bonds of communion and koinonia by not criticising their cardinal and their pope in public speeches or posting negativities about them on the web, and so on. Do they assent to all the defined dogmas rather than undefined moral matters of a personal conscience kind. Those legal questions are more important to us, so we do not get involved in these spiritual questions of a man or woman’s standing before conscience and his/her/their God.

So questions about penalties for canonical crimes concern us more - has the individual attempted homicide or suicide or falsification of public church documents or physically attempted abortion, and so on, i.e. we are worried about laws and crimes which feature penalties attached to them, rather than personal and private sins of no generalised importance to the General Community qua General Community considered in its social and public domains. So sorry we cannot respond to the reader’s question, but we are church lawyers concerned only with the general social and public and legal comportment of a citizen of God’s Churches insofar as he/she/they are capable of an assent to God’s Eternal Word Network once defined as definitions. ELS III.