December 11, 2020 09:40 AM UTC

Denver's Catholic Archbishops Have Got A Lot Of Nerve

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• by: Colorado Pols

Anti-abortion site LifeNews.com is excited to share the news:

A second Catholic archbishop spoke out this week against Joe Biden receiving communion unless he repents of his support for killing unborn babies in abortions.

Archbishop Samuel Aquila, of the Archdiocese of Denver, Colorado, agreed with Archbishop Charles Chaput who, earlier this month, said Biden, a pro-abortion Democrat, should not receive communion even though he claims to be a devout Catholic…

“Mr. Biden has said that he will continue to advance those same policies as president, and thus should not receive Holy Communion. His stated intention requires a strong and consistent response from Church leaders and faithful,” Chaput said.

What we have here are the current and immediately previous Archbishops of Denver–Charles Chaput held the position Samuel Aquila now occupies from 1997-2011–declaring that President-elect Joe Biden should not receive Holy Communion because Biden supports abortion rights. It’s not clear whether they are calling for Biden to formally excommunicated from the Catholic Church, or merely not allowed to take part in one of its foundational rituals. Since Biden is not a member of either archbishop’s congregation (Chaput is now retired), their opinion is just that. The D.C. Archbishop has already declared that Biden will still receive Communion, like millions of other Catholics in America who also happen to support abortion rights.

Chaput, the archbishop emeritus of Philadelphia, is against giving communion to those who refuse to repent, according to the Catholic News Agency.

“By his actions during the course of his public life, Mr. Biden has demonstrated that he is not in full communion with the Catholic Church,” Chaput wrote in a column at First Things.

The current and prior Archbishops of Denver are leading this political attack on President-elect Biden today, but it’s not the only time Denver’s Catholic leaders have been in the news recently. At the beginning of December, new information released to the public disclosed for the first time that a “beloved” Denver priest, Father Charles “Woody” Woodrich, was among dozens of Catholic priests in Colorado who sexually abused children for decades while the church worked tirelessly to cover it up. In a 2019 column on the longtime coverup of sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests–before Father Woody’s crimes were disclosed–Megan Schrader wrote about Chaput’s role in keeping these crimes under wraps:

Chaput was the archbishop in Denver from 1997 to 2011.

The [2019] report notes that from June 2002 to 2012, the Denver Archdiocese failed to report 25 of the 39 recorded allegations of clergy sex abuse that Colorado law required it to report to law enforcement.

From 2005 to 2008, Denver church officials settled dozens of lawsuits alleging abuse, and Chaput offered an apology to victims. But while Chaput settled cases out of court with victims, he was actively opposing changes to the statute of limitations both for cases of rape and child abuse and for cases of failure to report child abuse. There’s evidence, given the dates of when old abuses were reported, that Chaput, like so many of his colleagues, failed to report suspected crimes to police or to treat victims with the understanding and dignity they deserved.

By most accounts including Schrader’s, Archbishop Samuel Aquila has been more cooperative in reporting sex abuse allegations against his clergy than Chaput was. But knowing what we know today about Chaput’s role in suppressing allegations of child sex abuse against Catholic priests, the idea that he should be considered a moral authority on any subject today lands somewhere between laughable and offensive. As for Denver Archbishop Aquila, the voters of Colorado once again rejected an abortion ban in numbers that prove he’s not speaking for any kind of majority here.

Instead of trying to tell the Archbishop of D.C. how to run his church, or telling Joe Biden how to uphold the law of the land as President, we suggest Archbishop Aquila stick to what should be his highest priority: making sure Catholic priests aren’t molesting Colorado’s kids.