he workings of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops have once again become headline news, as the members, after airing sharp differences among themselves in an online meeting, approved a plan, released last Friday, to draft a “teaching document” about the role of the Eucharist and about their dealings with Catholic politicians who support abortion rights—in particular, President Joe Biden.

The plan raised the dramatic prospect that the nation’s second Catholic President, a faithful Sunday churchgoer, would not be allowed to go to the front of the altar and receive the Eucharist—the act at the center of the Mass, which represents the believer’s communion with Christ and the Church. The plan was interpreted by the press and by the bishops themselves as a sign of deep divisions in American Catholicism; it thrust the conference “into the very heart of the toxic partisan strife” of electoral politics, as Cardinal Joseph Tobin of Newark put it. And it left many Catholics bewildered: How can it be that the Church here is putting President Biden in the dock, while last month Catholic officials in London abruptly cleared Westminster Cathedral for the wedding of two baptized Catholics, the twice-divorced Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his live-in paramour, who bore their child last year?

The U.S. bishops’ immediate motive is clear: they want to send a message that to be a Catholic is to oppose legal abortion. The battle, though, is about much more. It is a sign of the traditionalists’ profound anxiety about the stature of the Church and its leaders in public life—an anxiety akin to that of white working-class Trumpists about their stature in a changing American society. But it is also, strangely, a sign of openness: it suggests that under Pope Francis the Church hierarchy is finally coming clean as a group of men with differing points of view, shaped by alliances and compromises, and led by a pope who has forsworn the papal prerogative to shut down conflict by authoritarian means.

The last time the bishops’ conference got this much attention was in February, 2004, when the prelates released a report on priestly sexual abuse—two years after allegations of widespread abuse and an official coverup in the archdiocese of Boston had become a matter of national scandal. Bishop Wilton D. Gregory, of Belleville, Illinois, who was the president of the conference, presented the report in terms that suggested that the scandal had passed. “I assure you that known offenders are not in ministry,” he said. “The terrible history recorded here is history.” The Times printed his remarks on the front page.

The same year, Senator John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts and a Catholic, was his party’s presumptive candidate for the White House, against President George W. Bush. As with Biden today, traditionalists, led by Raymond Burke, the archbishop of St. Louis, raised the prospect of denying Kerry the Eucharist because he supported the legal right to an abortion. That June, the bishops took up a proposal to restrict politicians’ access to Communion on that basis. After some temperate internal debate—and a letter from Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI) to Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, the archbishop of Washington, D.C., on the topic—the conference decided to leave matters in the hands of local bishops, rather than address it as a group. But, in the process, public attention was shifted away from the bishops’ handling of sexual abuse and toward their supervision of Mass and the sacraments.

The pattern is now repeating itself, with crucial differences. Again the bishops have been disgraced by allegations of clerical sexual abuse: this time, multiple acts of abuse of minors committed beginning in the nineteen-seventies by McCarrick himself, and detailed in a Vatican-commissioned report, the release of which last November led his eventual successor—Wilton Gregory, now a cardinal—to speak of “dark corners of our church of which I am deeply ashamed and profoundly angry—again.” (McCarrick, who was defrocked in 2019, has denied the allegations.) In what can be seen as another attempt to reclaim lost authority, traditionalists are once more asserting that support for abortion rights makes politicians “unworthy” to receive the Eucharist. But, this time, the politician who is the focus of that effort is the President, not a candidate. This time, the Pope is not Benedict but Francis, a moderate whose reluctance to join in the culture wars leaves traditionalists vexed. And, this time, the traditionalists are prevailing.

Their campaign began with the formation of a working group shortly after Biden defeated Donald Trump, whom traditionalist Catholic leaders had openly courted as a come-lately opponent of abortion and an appointer of conservative judges. It hardened on Inauguration Day, when the current president of the bishops’ conference, Archbishop José H. Gomez, of Los Angeles, put out a statement denouncing the new President’s plans to further the “moral evils” of abortion rights and gay rights—whereas Pope Francis sent Biden a telegram of congratulations. Gomez’s statement sparked an unprecedented open disagreement in the hierarchy this spring, as bishops took to stating their own positions, in the press and on social media. Bishop Robert McElroy, of San Diego, writing in the Jesuit magazine America, “warned against letting the sacrament be ‘weaponized,’ ” citing Pope Francis’s 2013 statement that the Eucharist is “not a prize for the perfect but a powerful medicine and nourishment for the weak.” Meanwhile, Charles Chaput, the archbishop emeritus of Philadelphia, resorting to the “rights talk” that conservatives used to despise, wrote in the conservative journal First Things that, when the likes of Joe Biden receive Communion, “they not only put their own souls in grave jeopardy but—just as grievously—they also violate the rights of Catholics who do seek to live their faith authentically.”

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Cardinal Gregory—who now, as the archbishop of Washington, is the President’s local bishop—has made clear that he will not bar Biden from the sacrament, so the argument is somewhat academic. (Biden, at a press conference last Friday, said of the proposal, “I don’t think that’s going to happen.”) But it’s an argument that the traditionalists are determined to continue. In May, Cardinal Luis Ladaria, the prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican’s doctrinal office, sent a letter to the head of the conference recommending that the bishops undertake “extensive and serene dialogue” among themselves and with Catholic politicians, rather than putting the matter to a vote at the June meeting. They put it to a vote anyway, and, after a couple of hours of testy virtual debate, approved the planned document, 168–55, with six abstentions. Traditionalists accused moderates of trying to “filibuster,” with a call to wait for an in-person discussion at their next meeting, in November. Moderates warned traditionalists of mission creep and overreach. Prelates on each side accused those on the other of playing politics with the stuff of faith.

The controversy is plainly political. First of all, the document is likely to be released prior to the 2022 midterm elections, enabling traditionalists to cast aspersions on Democratic Catholic political figures—among others, Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House, and Representative Ted Lieu, both California liberals. Meanwhile, it confirms a decades-long shift in the bishops’ role from local potentates to media-ready actors in the national political realm. But the shift shows not the strengthening of Catholic clerical authority in American life but the waning of it. For the most part, especially in the wake of priest sex-abuse scandals, American bishops no longer enjoy positions of prestige as community leaders, teachers, or shepherds of their flocks. Having failed to persuade their congregations about abortion—nearly seventy per cent of American Catholics don’t want Roe V. Wade to be overturned—traditionalist bishops have joined forces with hard-charging Republican legislators and legal theorists funded by the corporate right, making freedom of religion the linchpin in conservative grievances about gay rights, federally organized health care, and restrictions on campaign donations and political advocacy.

Nowhere is the decline of clerical authority in ordinary Catholic life more evident than in the sacrament of the Eucharist. In the middle of the past century, Sunday Mass was the vital center of American Catholic life, preceded by weekly confession. (You needed a priest to forgive your sins, so as to be fit to receive Communion on Sunday.) Then, in the years after the Second Vatican Council concluded, in 1965, people stopped going to confession (the reasons are complex, involving everything from fresh interpretations of the nature of sin to the introduction of psychology and other forms of self-examination in Catholic culture); and, as they did, priests lost the everyday power to judge their actions, mete out penance, and grant forgiveness. Sunday Mass has remained the center of Catholic life, but Catholics’ belief that the consecrated bread is the actual body of Christ has declined to the point where a 2019 Pew poll found that only a third of Catholics held it. It follows that, if Catholics are less prone to believe that the Eucharist is the actual body of Christ than they once were, they’re also less prone to believe that they must be deemed free of mortal sin by a priest in order to receive it.

The pandemic compounded these developments. All at once, people couldn’t assemble en masse for Mass. Priests held online services, but the encounter with Christ in the Eucharist couldn’t be reproduced virtually. Meanwhile, the government restriction on public gatherings in houses of worship became a political issue: the bishop of Brooklyn, Nicholas DiMarzio (who faces two allegations of sexual abuse of minors, dating from the seventies, which he has denied), sued Governor Andrew Cuomo to allow houses of worship to open more fully, on religious-freedom grounds. The case made its way to the Supreme Court, and, in November, DiMarzio prevailed, 5–4, with the newly appointed Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett, a Catholic, joining the majority. Still, it may be that the habit of weekly Mass will fall away as the habit of confession did after Vatican II. In 2019, about forty per cent of American Catholics still went to Mass every week; it is as yet hard to tell whether empty spaces in the pews represent lingering precautionary measures or evidence of further decline.

The traditionalists’ campaign about Communion is having an unintended consequence: the sight of bishops strenuously disagreeing with one another has affirmed the long-denied fact that the hierarchy operates according to raw political dynamics. When Benedict XVI resigned in 2013—becoming the first Pope to do so since 1415—episcopal politics, typically practiced behind closed doors and sotto voce, were brought out into the open. If it is no longer to be presumed that a Pope will rule until he dies, it’s less unseemly for the bishops to be seen trying to shape the Church that the next Pope will lead. Francis, who was elected after Benedict’s resignation, clearly understands this. He has promoted a view of the Church as a dynamic entity, saying that it should sponsor “processes” that encourage dialogue, rather than maintain formal structures (“spaces,” he calls them) for their own sake. The fact that he is standing aside as the U.S. bishops quarrel over abortion politics is evidence that he is committed to this view, even if the traditionalists seek to undermine his efforts to address climate change, immigration, and inter-religious dialogue.

The traditionalists are acting within their rights. In ignoring the C.D.F.’s warning, they behaved much as some moderate bishops did when they distanced themselves from a harsh statement against same-sex unions that the C.D.F. issued in March. Yet their plan is both hard-hearted and shortsighted. Such influence as the bishops exercise in public life derives from the fact that they lead a church full of people like Biden—Catholics who, unlike the bishops, bring experience as laypeople, spouses, and parents to bear on their faith. It is a Church whose roughly seventy million U.S. members hold a range of positions on legal abortion, with significant numbers not merely tolerating it but supporting it, in that it recognizes profound decisions about childbearing as a matter of individual conscience.

Cardinal Ladaria, in his letter, advised the bishops that the standard of Eucharistic worthiness should be applied to “all the faithful, rather than only one category of Catholics”—not just to politicians, that is. And he stressed that abortion shouldn’t be seen as a “grave matter” to the exclusion of other issues. That position gives rise to rhetorical questions: Why shouldn’t the bishops seek to withhold the Eucharist from all Catholics whose views on abortion are akin to Biden’s—or who use birth control, or who live with their partners and have sex before marriage, as Boris Johnson clearly did? Catholics have been answering such questions in their own ways. On Twitter, Ted Lieu dared the Church to withhold the Eucharist from him because of his liberal positions on a number of issues. On Sunday morning, an old friend—a financier, a Catholic-school trustee, a wearer of vested suits, as buttoned-down as they come—texted me a photo of his Mass collection envelope, on which he’d written that he was withholding the weekly donation he makes to his parish in a New York City suburb owing to the controversy.

How will the controversy be resolved, and what kind of American Catholicism will it sponsor? It’s possible to imagine a Church in which people, prejudged as unworthy, stay seated in the pews on Sunday rather than approach the altar to receive Communion—or just stay away from Mass altogether, in their recognition that support for legal abortion, divorce, gay rights, and the like are not weaknesses in need of healing but positions held in conscience. In fact, such an image of the Church resembles the Church as it actually is—one whose size and diversity and variety in the expressions of the faithful are key sources of the authority that the bishops claim for themselves.