Could Joe Biden be excommunicated?

Princeton’s Robert George called for Biden’s excommunication soon after Biden’s wedding duty was reported. But although the Catholic Church doesn’t sanctify gay marriage and considers homosexual behavior a sin, Biden didn’t actually break church law, said the Rev. James Bretzke, a theologian at Boston College.

A Catholic can only be excommunicated on “canonical grounds,” he said. “It’s not like voting the person off the island.”

A bishop would have to cite the specific church law, known as canon, that the Catholic follower broke, “much like arresting someone,” Bretzke said. There is no provision in canon allowing for the excommunication of someone on the grounds that he officiated a civil ceremony “same-sex or otherwise,” he said.

“No canon excommunicates a Catholic for officiating at a ‘same-sex wedding,'” Edward Peters explained Wednesday in his blog dedicated to canon law. But Pope Francis or Wuerl “could issue legislation making such officiating an excommunicable crime,” added Peters, who teaches canon law at Detroit’s Sacred Heart Major Seminary.

Peters, whom Pope Benedict XVI appointed to the tribunal that administers church justice, stated that Biden would have to demonstrate a pattern of behavior that violates church law to trigger any formal disciplinary action.

Mark Johnson, a theology professor at Marquette University, agreed. A bishop must warn the follower that his public, repeated behavior defies church doctrine before excommunicating a parishioner, Johnson said.

“My sense is that the vice president did not check in with the Cardinal Archbishop of Washington, D.C., and then go and perform the wedding ceremony,” he said.

Only the pope or the bishop of the diocese in which the person resides, in Biden’s case, Wuerl, can excommunicate someone.

Some bishops have publicly warned politicians who might visit their dioceses, including Biden, that they will be denied communion in their churches, but they cannot excommunicate anyone outside their jurisdiction.

Excommunication does not mean kicking someone out of the church. It’s a denial of sacraments, such as receiving communion, and can be reversed.

The issue of whether a Catholic politician should be excommunicated for policy stances or voting for laws that run counter to church doctrine is not new. When Secretary of State John Kerry sought the presidency from the Senate in 2004, his standing within the church was often discussed.

It has also been frequently raised about Rep. Nancy Pelosi, most prominently when the California Democrat was House speaker. But the only example of a federal, Catholic politician being excommunicated recently was former Rep. David Obey. La Crosse Bishop Raymond Burke began denying the Wisconsin Democrat, and other lawmakers in his diocese, the sacraments in 2004 for his stance on abortion.

There are a lot of bishops “playing fast and loose [with excommunication threats] in a frankly irresponsible manner,” noted Bretzke, who previously taught at Rome’s Pontifical Gregorian University.

Although they don’t believe Biden overseeing a gay marriage in the vice president’s residence is an excommunicable offense, none of the theologians thought it a good idea either.

“As a committed, conservative Catholic, I am personally weary of the vice president’s behavior,” Johnson said. “But he is my brother in the faith. Still, if I should ever meet him, I’d give him a hell of a talking to.”

But the event could be added to a list of other offenses that could get Biden in hot water with the church, Peters wrote.

Officiating a same-sex ceremony “would certainly qualify as an especially egregious manifestation of one’s general contempt for church teaching, a contempt that might have been demonstrated in other behaviors such as, say, on-going political support for ‘same-sex marriage’ and, for that matter, for legalized abortion and so on,” Peters warned.

Biden’s office had no comment about the controversy.