It's news becomes sometimes when a priest does this--as in the famous case of Father Marcel Guarnizo, who quietly denied the Eucharist to a practicing Buddhist woman in an open lesbian relationship--he is tossed out of his job and receives numerous credible death threats. In that situation the archbishop did not back him up; in fact, it was the archbishop who stripped him of his priestly faculties in that archdiocese. That archbishop, Donald Wuerl of Washington, is now very close to the pope.
Oh, no! Wuerl did that? face-plant.