It applies to all people who are publicly known to be living in some ongoing situation of grave sin.
There is NO excuse for Cardinals and Archbishops of the Catholic Church to be allowing notorious grave sinners to be receiving Communion.
Pope Benedict was explicit about this to the American bishops in 2004, but Cardinal McCarrick lied to them about what the Pope had written. But this is irrelevant. A properly-instructed Catholic child knows the answer to these questions. The majority of bishops just don’t want to do the right thing. And they deliberately obfuscate the issue with political blather.
Giving Communion to notorious grave sinners is ALWAYS A MORTAL SIN. The existence of Canon 915 has nothing to do with it. The canon forbids it BECAUSE it’s a mortal sin, not the other way around. There is NO NEED for any interpretation of the canon, because moral theology answers the question already.
It is a mortal sin for a bishop to pressure or threaten his priests to induce them to commit this mortal sin.
This means that Cardinals Wuerl, Dolan, George, O’Malley, an others, and Archbishop Chaput and most other bishops, are walking around habitually in the state of mortal sin—because pro-abortion politicians continue to receive Communion with these bishops’ approval.
This is true. The part of the Scriptural injunction to “Go and sin no more” is left out. It is one thing to fall repeatedly into sin and beg forgiveness, its quite another to embrace and glorify the sin. because you cannot serve two Masters.