WASHINGTON, D.C. ? Washington Cardinal Theodore McCarrick blamed the media and partisan activists for unjustly attacking U.S. Roman Catholic bishops who spoke out this election year on whether dissenting Catholic politicians should receive Communion. He accused them of spreading internal dissension among church leaders.

In a speech delivered behind closed doors and released Wednesday, McCarrick pleaded for unity among his colleagues.

“The media or partisan forces sometimes tried to pit one bishop against another. I look around the room and see bishops who have been unfairly attacked as partisan, others who have been called cowards,” he said during a private session of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. “That is not who we are.”

The bishops wound up at the center of a nasty national debate over religion and politics after St. Louis Archbishop Raymond Burke said he would deny the Eucharist to Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry, a Catholic who supports abortion rights.

Anti-abortion advocates pressured more bishops to follow Burke’s lead. Other Catholics lobbied the prelates to highlight a broader range of moral issues in the election, such as war.

McCarrick, head of a bishops’ task force on Catholics in public life, became a target of critics himself after saying he opposed using Communion as a sanction.

In other business, bishops voted in open session to join a new alliance that would be the broadest Christian group ever formed in the United States, linking American evangelicals and Catholics in an ecumenical organization for the first time.

The alliance, called Christian Churches Together in the U.S.A., is set to kick off next year. It would also include mainline Protestants, Orthodox Christians, and black and other minority churches, though the U.S. Catholic Church would be the largest denomination.