Do NOT miss this terrific article at Crisis by Jerome German: The War to Destroy the Eucharist. He treats the issue of withholding Communion from errant public figures but does so with amazing clarity.
Tastes:
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We walk among saints and monsters. Such are the days with which we are blessed. It is the ultimate naïveté or denial to live in our era and to be oblivious of the fact that we are walking through a battlefield. Such oblivion pleases the powers of darkness a great deal. When the unarmed wander onto the battlefield, they need not be resisted; they will fall in due time.
On a battlefield, everything is a weapon: information, water, shelter, clothing, medicine, and last but certainly not least, food. Starving soldiers do not win wars. The supply line, or the lack thereof, will determine the outcome of a battle just as surely as the quality of the munitions or the training of the troops.
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Those who receive unworthily do not even acknowledge the existence of the battlefield of life—the confrontation that permeates all of existence. Viaticum is of no value for the pusillanimous struggle they are waging on the battlefield of vanity, a silly little sociopolitical game of prestige and saving face, the stuff of middle-school popularity contests. Theirs is the immaturity that permeates our era. By supporting them in their sad little diversion from reality, our bishops are preventing their charges from marching onto the battlefield of life and are galvanizing their oblivion to the real battle. They thereby sacrifice these errant souls on the altar of their own petty clerical games of prestige and saving face.
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Mr. German needs to write on spiritual matters more often. What a profound essay he wrote. He beautifully frames the reality of what both bishops and political figures are doing. I have kind of speculated that when Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament is received unworthily, He may withdraw from the Eucharist, in some way the receiver could not possibly know. This is just my unknowing hypothesis of course, hopefully not offensive. But the reality is probably worse than that. Scripture warns about receiving unworthily, and the truth about what that act brings about in the spiritual realm for that individual is far more and worse than what can even be imagined. The bishops don’t know or don’t care, that this is the case. They are complicit in that reality.
Kathleen10 — St. Albert the Great writes about receiving the Eucharist sacramentally and spiritually. Normally, receiving sacramentally also included receiving spiritually. But he seemed to think that, as with other Sacraments received unworthily and without preparation, one could receive the Eucharist sacramentally without receiving it spiritually (at least until the person repented, etc.).
So you’d get the sacramental graces (whether or not they expressed themselves until you amended things), but you wouldn’t get the spiritual graces that even a person just doing a spiritual Communion would get.
This is probably not a good explanation, and I don’t know if that counts under how Eucharistic theology eventually worked out; but that was his idea.