The latest self-important politician’s tempest in a teacup comes from the land of tea time: England. Over the weekend, an unknown British Parliamentary back-bencher decided to make a name for himself.

Chris Coghlan represents Dorking and Horley, a constituency just southwest of London. He’s a member of the Liberal Democrats, so not part of the official Labour Government. Parties like the Liberal Democrats (and variants elsewhere, like Canada’s New Democrats) are a bizarre but useful bogeyman: by not being part of government, they can pretend to be “independent” (though, usually, you can count on them to support a leftist government). They generate a weird synergy with the mainstream “Left” party (in this case, Labour). Like the Ocasio-Cortez “progressives” in the American Democratic party, their extremist policies generally scare enough voters to get those voters to vote for the mainstream “left” (Democrats, Labour) to keep radicals out of power, but their ability to pull votes means more mainstream parties often have to accommodate their radical ideas and make them appear “centrist.” It’s “not letting your left hand know what your lefter hand is doing.”

The House of Commons recently adopted controversial legislation to introduce assisted suicide into Britain. That was days after the House changed the law basically to allow abortion-on-demand.

The Bishops Conference of England and Wales tried (and failed) to mobilize opposition to the assisted suicide bill. Hope is now the House of Lords forces at least some modifications. As the bill became more permissive in Commons, however, its margin of approval narrowed: from 55 on second reading to only 23 for final passage. Chris Coghlan was one of those 23 (see here).

Coghlan is a Catholic. His pastor warned him about that vote. And on Sunday, his pastor publicly denied him Communion. Coghlan was outraged and took to global social media to complain that the pastor singled him out at Mass to announce that decision, even as children from the Catholic school Coghlan’s children attend were in church. As one critic noted on X, he was so outraged about being publicly called out he promptly informed his 5,000 followers on a global social media platform and apparently made a statement to The Guardian that Austen Ivereigh retweeted (here). Nothing quite like “if you have an issue with your brother, raise it between your eyes and at least 10,000 others.’” As if your parliamentary vote is a national secret.

The MP’s Guardian apologia pro vita sua was a pastiche of thoroughly modern “Catholicism.” He starts out by telling us he is a member of parliament first and “also a Roman Catholic.” That already tells you his priorities. His faith “is profoundly important to me but … does not – and will not – have any relevance to my parliamentary responsibilities.” Lest anybody doubt the Catholicity of such a position, he promptly invokes the patron saint of political schizophrenia, St. John Fitzgerald Kennedy, who insisted his religion would not affect his politics as “Democratic… candidate for president.” That’s been the Democratic Party line ever since, reinforced by its saintly doctor of the Church, St. Mario Cuomo of Albany.

Coghlan engages in the best of jesuitical hairsplitting by claiming his pastor was wrong in calling him complicit in “a murderous act.” All the bill does is let a doctor provide a patient with a lethal substance. Maybe the patient is only going to put it in his flowerpot. In any event, it’s the patient who might commit self-murder, not the doctor. And all our poor little MP did was create the legal infrastructure that makes that act exempt from the general legal prohibitions against murder, suicide, and complicity in either. And he got balled out by his pastor for that! In front of other people! Including his kids’ friends! The member from Dorking and Horley doesn’t bother to engage with Catholic teaching that suicide itself is evil. He’s convinced in “conscience” that his vote was right. Another thoroughly “modern Catholic” notion of “conscience”: it makes up its own morality. It doesn’t reflect moral values; it creates them.

Americans, of course, have been down this road before, with hierarchical indulgence of politicians and judges (starting with Justice William Brennan, the New Jersey Catholic who was part of the Roe majority in 1973) that greased the skids for abortion-on-demand. When primarily lay Catholics got loud enough in their complaints about the scandal of admitting to the Eucharist these votaries of the culture of death, then-Cardinal Ratzinger wrote to the American bishops justifying the latter’s exclusion from Communion. That letter, of course, was bowdlerized by then-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick who, with various subsequent proteges and fellow theological travelers, insisted we cannot “weaponize” the Bread of Life against politicians actively advancing the culture of death. Their “no-bars-to-the-Eucharistic-banquet” approach makes them confuse the two banquets depicted in Proverbs 9, where those trafficking with folly’s death are warned “little do they know that the shades are there; that her guests are in the depths of Sheol” (v. 9). Of course, that would be clear if we ever bothered to read (much less apply) I Cor. 11:27-32, where Paul warns against unworthy Eucharistic reception as eating unto judgment. But our pastors and their liturgical friends have made sure that passage rarely appears in the lectionary except, perhaps, on a Tuesday every other year in the middle of summer.

Perhaps we are lucky. Undoubtedly, if Francisco was still Pope, Coghlan would have invoked the Pontiff of “accompaniment” to assure us that il Papa would no doubt give him Communion even if his local padre won’t.

I mention how episcopal confusion has led to politicians actively promoting abortion in the Communion procession on Sundays. We are at an inflection point right now with regard to assisted suicide. There’s still a semblance of social resistance to the creeping advance of death, by suicide or even more actively, across the West. But the hour is late. At least ten (primarily Democratic) U.S. states now accept the practice. Legislation to add New York is sitting on a Catholic governor’s desk. The fact that we don’t know what Kathy Hochul will do with it should itself be a scandal.

Archbishop Joseph Rummel still gets kudos for excommunicating three Catholics for opposing his call to desegregate the New Orleans archdiocesan parochial schools. That action is regarded by some as having taken the wind out of the sails of any Catholics joining the segregation resistance movement in the post-1950s South. If Rummel could excommunicate people for voicing opinions that de facto condoned discrimination, how much more should bishops excommunicate those who provide de jure permanent legal structures condoning lethal discrimination against classes of members of the human race — for even saying the law can allow what Vatican II called an “unspeakable crime against God and man” (Gaudium et spes, 51)? Imagine the moral audacity coupled with intellectual superficiality to suggest voting for these things, as Coghlan puts it, reflects “a commitment to justice and human dignity,” and that he — unlike his 28 peers who changed their votes between the second and third readings — supposedly displayed courage against “pressure.”

As I said, we are at a turning point. Catholic bishops can either use their role as guardian of the Eucharist (which extends beyond where to put candles in relation to the altar) to exercise the “prophetic moral leadership” they so often love to laud after the fact to bring faith to bear on the end-of-life ending-life juggernaut, or they can stand around wringing their hands like they did for 50 years on abortion (whose end largely happened despite, rather than because of, their contributions). If they are serious about “faith in action” in life, they can preserve space for real rather than ersatz Catholicism to prevent the political polarization of end-of-life debates on the lines that occurred with beginning-of-life debates, i.e., where one party (U.S. Democrats, Canadian Liberals, etc.) have declared their big tents closed to real pro-life Catholics.

Kudos to MP Coghlan’s pastor: On the feast of Ss. Peter and Paul, he applied the Petrine statement “It is better to obey God than man” (Acts 5:29).

Finally, the UK is a funny place. Coghlan wraps up his paean to himself by saying he rejects “completely inappropriate interference in democracy by religious authorities.” This, in a country with an established Christian church. This, in a country whose head of state is also head of his church. Or perhaps Coghlan’s morality is whatever can get a majority vote in Parliament?

Maybe Coghlan should attend remedial catechism with his kids. Heaven save us from such men of “conscience.”