Chicago Cardinal came a-cropper in welcoming all and sundry to Communion? Commentators find fault with him for ignoring the state-of-grace requirement . . .

Rewriting doctrine on the fly? . . .

He did it in his newspaper’s column, where he eschewed “cold and hard gnostic logic” — about which no man or woman can disagree.

This logic, abhorrent to one and all, would exclude some from Holy Communion, he wrote, consigning sayings of his fellow bishops via USCCB to outer darkness.

Specifically:

In order to be properly disposed to receive Communion, participants should not be conscious of grave sin . . . . A person who is conscious of grave sin is not to receive the Body and Blood of the Lord without prior sacramental confession except for a grave reason where there is no opportunity for confession.

In this case, the person is to be mindful of the obligation to make an act of perfect contrition, including the intention of confessing as soon as possible (canon 916). A frequent reception of the Sacrament of Penance is encouraged for all.

If this be cold and hard gnostic logic, what end is up? What’s going on here?

Among those piling on the cardinal is Larry Chapp, retired theology teacher and as such used to giving and taking on the classroom scale. His Cardinal Cupich and the Hermeneutics of the Abyss is a take-no-prisoner broadside, in which he sums up:

Moral antinomianism in matters sexual is not true mercy and is, therefore, not a lifeboat but a mirage that offers a false hope. It is honey laced with arsenic.

In his “essay” Cupich pits “God’s love against his justice” and “misleadingly” cites Pope Benedict to justify his position, says Chapp, presenting “Christ’s grace in the new covenant as a kind of de facto negation of the demands of the moral law in the old covenant.”

Wrong-o, says Chapp. “Benedict never pitted God’s moral truth against God’s loving mercy as Cupich does here.”

He did say God’s love “trumps his justice,” but entirely to emphasize the priority of salvation over perdition. “In no way” did he imply that “somehow the Church can now open the communion table to any and all regardless of [his or her] moral condition.”

Indeed, Chapp continues,

the entire Cupich essay remains on the level of a muddled mess so long as one tries to take it seriously as an actual attempt at theology. It is nothing of the sort, and I do not believe . . . Cardinal Cupich really cares if the theology he is attempting to create here out of whole cloth . . . of open Eucharistic table fellowship for almost all sexual sinners—is coherent.

No. It’s “sophomoric obtuseness . . . not an attempt at theology at all,” but “a form of political rhetoric meant to make formerly rejected views palatable for the average Catholic via a sophistical word salad borrowed from NPR and other mouthpieces of the dominant cultural ethos.” Whew.

Chapp was just getting warmed up.

Cupich’s use (abuse) of Benedict’s theology so as to put it in service to his own “attempt to baptize the sexual revolution . . . scarcely rises to the level of nonsense,” he continued.

Benedict describes not a great relaxation of traditional morality but “the great theo-drama of salvation history,” whereby “divine freedom [contends] with sinful human freedom, and . . . seeks to reconcile . . . sin with . . . divine justice without . . . dismissing its demands.”

It’s a scenario in which salvation is “appropriated” by living as “a disciple of Jesus . . . what the earliest Church referred to as ‘The Way.’”

This is . . . the Gospel with its . . . interplay of sin and grace; redemption and judgment.

It is the language, not only of Benedict, but also of St. Paul, the Fathers, Augustine, Aquinas, Bonaventure, and of all the Councils and doctors of the Church.

How, therefore, is it possible for Cardinal Cupich suddenly to discover that this grand theo-drama of salvation is a form of “exclusionary” speech at odds with the Gospel’s “inclusive” message of redemption?

Is this what he means by “exclusionary speech that seeks pharisaically to exclude whole classes of sinners (and, once again, here it is clear he means sexual sinners) by turning God’s justice against his love”?

Pope Benedict never pitted God’s moral truth against God’s loving mercy as Cupich does here. Benedict does say that God’s love trumps his justice, but this is to emphasize the theological priority of the economy of salvation over the economy of perdition. It in no way implies that somehow the Church can now open the communion table to any and all regardless of their moral condition.

What Cupich says

remains on the level of a muddled mess so long as one tries to take it seriously as an actual attempt at theology. In reality, it is nothing of the sort, and I do not believe for one second that Cardinal Cupich really cares if the theology he is attempting to create here out of whole cloth—a theology of open Eucharistic table fellowship for almost all sexual sinners—is coherent.

Because this level of sophomoric obtuseness is not an attempt at theology at all. It is a form of political rhetoric meant to make formerly rejected views palatable for the average Catholic via a sophistical word salad borrowed from NPR and other mouthpieces of the dominant cultural ethos.

Oh my.

More later, if you will, of this rebuttal of the Chicago cardinal’s Chicago Catholic column.