Catholic here, and I've gone through 12 years of Catholic schooling thus far.
My impressions of a lot of Catholic bishops in America is that they are rediculously out-of-date and close-minded. Many of them are resistant to changes that have already been made decades ago and their actions are perfectly representative of it.
According to Vatican II - which took place in the early 60's - it doesn't matter significantly if this girl takes communion or not anyway. Vatican II basically stated that 1) there is Truth in most all religions and 2) since there is Truth in most all religions, any good person is capable of receiving salvation (or, closeness with God as I would prefer to call it).
The important thing to recognize about ANY religion is that there is the religion and there there are the humans involved in the religion. As humans, these people make mistakes. In this case, I see what seems to me to be a lot of American Church leaders who resist the fact that they do not have the same "power" that church leaders had when they were growing up as children. They grew up in a climate of intolerance, where one "had to be Catholic" in order to find God, and now the Church community is slowly shifting toward a climate of tolerance with greater understanding of other people's religious choices and greater respect of them. This is a shift that will likely take over a century IMO.
To sum it up, I think there are many bad (not evil, just misguided) people in the Church today - and in most religions today. I also know from experience that there are many good people as well. People who are in touch with the discoveries we have made about the universe, humanity, and the individual in the past 100 years. People who are recognizant of the fact that it makse no sense to believe that a good person would not be capable of closeness with God simply because they did not eat something, or go to a certain building.
The people we read about though are similar to Linux zealots (never thought you'd see Catholicism and Linux in the same thread did ya?!
). Linux zealots are a loud group of Linux users and they're completely insensitive to the actual needs of the computer user. As good as Linux may be, they turn the average computer user off to Linux because of the zealotry. Similarly many current religiousleaders do the same. The message of the RELIGION is drowned out by THEIR message and, thus, pushes people away.
One of the most important - and most dfificult - things to do regarding religion is learning to seperate the RELIGION from the people IN the religion.