A Coast priest called Biden ‘an embarrassment to Catholicism.’ Did he break IRS rules?
On Sunday, a Bay St. Louis priest took the pulpit at Our Lady of the Gulf Catholic Church to deliver a homily entitled “Joe Biden is an embarrassment to Catholicism.”
The Rev. Michael O’Connor argued that Biden “masquerades as Catholic” and that his stances on abortion and gay marriage are incompatible with the teachings of the church. The homily was posted to the church’s YouTube page.
By taking such an explicit stance on one of the two major-party candidates running for president, the priest toed a legal line: the Internal Revenue Service prohibits churches, as tax-exempt organizations, from endorsing or opposing candidates for office.
The agency’s rules say that if churches intervene in political campaigns, they risk losing tax-exempt status. A religious leader’s political activities are attributed to their organization if they are undertaken during worship services, as O’Connor’s remarks were.
In an interview with the Sun Herald, O’Connor said he knew his remarks might be controversial, but he wasn’t concerned. He invoked the example of Jesus Christ, who was “crucified for speaking the truth.”
He said he did not believe he had violated tax laws because he had not explicitly endorsed a candidate.
“I was highlighting the Catholic moral teachings,” he said.
Politics or morality?
The homily offered a response to one of the day’s readings, Matthew 22:15-21. The passage describes how in an effort to force Jesus to take an unpopular stance on a divisive issue, the Pharisees and Herodians, united only in their disdain for him, ask whether it is lawful to pay the census tax to Caesar. Jesus sees through the trap and gives a seemingly straightforward answer.
“Then repay to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God,” he replies.
But religious scholars are divided about what exactly Jesus meant. And 2,000 years later, the distinction between Caesar and God— between politics and morality — is rarely clear, scholars say, given that in a democracy, our laws are intended to reflect communal understandings of right and wrong.
Though O’Connor says he was speaking only about Catholic moral principles, coming just two weeks before Election Day, the homily sounded distinctly political to many who commented on Facebook.
“Joe Biden embraces teachings that are absolutely and fundamentally opposed to the priorities of our church to protect life, to protect the sanctity and the holiness of marriage,” O’Connor said. “He is in some respects an embarrassment to Catholicism.”
O’Connor criticized Biden’s stance on gay marriage, saying that marriage is “a union of one man and one woman.”
He also suggested that the Democratic candidate had taken his cues on morality from former cardinal Theodore McCarrick, who was removed from the priesthood after numerous accusations of sexual abuse of minors and adults.
“I fear that Joe Biden has had bad shepherds, bad teachers,” he said. “Maybe Cardinal McCarrick was his cardinal or priest.”
What does the law say?
Though O’Connor’s criticism of Biden was sharp, Philip Hackney, associate professor of law at the University of Pittsburgh and an expert on tax-exempt organiztions, said it’s not clear that it crossed the line into activity prohibited by the Internal Revenue Service.
“Some might conclude that he has, others might conclude that he has not,” Hackney said.
There aren’t many high-profile cases of the IRS revoking a church’s tax-exempt status based on its political activities, and the precedents that do exist differ from O’Connor’s homily in some significant ways.
Just before the 1992 election, a church in Binghamton, New York, placed a full-page advertisement in USA Today and the Washington Times. The ad claimed Bill Clinton supported abortion on demand and distributing condoms in schools. “How then can we vote for Bill Clinton?” it concluded.
The IRS revoked the church’s tax-exempt status, and a federal appeals court upheld that move.
In 2004, a religious nonprofit called Catholic Answers distributed voter guides and a series of newsletters claiming John Kerry should not receive communion. The IRS found the nonprofit had broken the rules.
Starting in 2008, a conservative Christian organization called Alliance Defending Freedom organized an annual event called Pulpit Freedom Sunday. Participating pastors preached on explicitly political topics, recorded their sermons, and sent the tapes to the IRS in the hopes of triggering an investigation. Then, the investigated church could launch a lawsuit to challenge the constitutionality of restricting churches’ political speech.
The IRS never took the bait. In 2009, the agency essentially stopped auditing churches after a court sided with a Minnesota church that challenged the legitimacy of its audit. The court said the IRS needed to clarify which officials have the authority to initiate investigations into churches. But the IRS hasn’t done that.
In 2014, a Mississippi church paid for an ad supporting then-U.S. Sen. Thad Cochran. The IRS didn’t get involved.
Hackney said the IRS doesn’t have much appetite for picking fights with politicking pastors.
“Going after churches is not popular generally,” he said.
A divided Catholic community
On Facebook, the clip of O’Connor’s drew nearly 300 shares and almost 400 comments. Most of them were supportive.
“Thank you so much father Mike for being so brave and saying what should be said in all Catholic Churches,” wrote the top commenter.
A few were critical.
“Fr Mike — you need to leave politics out of your sermon. Make your opinion (and that’s exactly what that is) at the voting booth,” one man commented.
One woman wrote that she planned to write the Biloxi diocese to share her frustrations with the homily.
“Jesus should be our judge, not the Priest,” she wrote.
The debate mirrored a national conversation in the Catholic community over Biden’s candidacy and his faith. From La Crosse, Wisconsin to Providence, Rhode Island, bishops and priests have criticized Biden, who could become the country’s second Catholic president, and Catholics who are considering supporting him.
But other Catholic leaders have pushed back. San Diego Bishop Robert McElroy argued that attacks on Biden’s faith place undue weight on abortion and “reduce Catholic social teaching to a single issue.” La Crosse Bishop William Patrick Callahan chastised Father James Altman for saying, “You cannot be Catholic and be a Democrat. Period.”
In a statement to the Washington Times, Callahan said Altman’s words came across “as angry and judgmental, lacking any charity and in a way that causes scandal both in the Church and in society.”
By Tuesday morning, the Biloxi Diocese had not returned a request for comment.
This story was originally published October 21, 2020 at 5:50 AM.
