Some Catholic blogs are reporting that last Sunday, Vice President-elect Joe Biden received Communion while attending Mass in Tallahassee, Fla.

In response to the incident, Bishop John Ricard of Pensecola-Tallahassee, Fla., has posted a letter to Biden — written in a spirit of “urgency” — on his diocese’s website.

Bishop Ricard’s message to the pro-abortion Veep-elect: Search your conscience before presenting yourself again for Communion.

The Nov. 4 letter does not directly assert that Biden should not have received Communion last weekend in Bishop Ricard’s diocese.

But in the letter, which quotes from the U.S. bishops’ 2004 document “Catholics in Political Life,” Bishop Ricard implies that Biden has rendered himself unfit to receive Communion “by your support for laws that fail to protect the unborn, a profound disconnection from your human and personal obligation to protect the weakest and most innocent among us: the child in the womb.”

States the letter, “Sunday Mass provides Catholics with the nourishment to live in the image of Jesus Christ whose mission is directed to the orphan and the widow, to the poor and the vulnerable. The principles of right reason, knowable to all even beyond the categories of faith, attest the common good is served only when the least of our brethren are accorded full rights correspondent to their inviolable dignity. Thus, human life is to be respected from the moment of conception until natural death. The Church has taught this from the beginning, and civilized societies live by this principle.”

Bishop Ricard’s letter to Biden concludes, “I pray that the Catholic faith you have been raised in, the faith by which you pray, and the life of virtue which flows from both may strengthen you so that you may have the strength needed to witness Jesus, even as the martyrs did, and live by the virtue of fortitude as you proclaim your support to the Person of Christ in the most vulnerable of his members: the pre-born child. You are, Senator, always welcome to nourish such a faith within the Diocese of Pensacola-Tallahassee.”

— Tom McFeely