First you get down on your knees,
Fiddle with your rosaries,
Bow your head with great respect,
And genuflect, genuflect, genuflect!
Do whatever steps you want if
You have cleared them with the Pontiff.
Everybody say his own
Kyrie eleison,
Doin' the Vatican Rag.
Get in line in that processional,
Step into that small confessional.
There the guy who's got religion'll
Tell you if your sin's original.
If it is, try playin' it safer,
Drink the wine and chew the wafer,
Two, four, six, eight,
Time to transubstantiate!
So get down upon your knees,
Fiddle with your rosaries,
Bow your head with great respect,
And genuflect, genuflect, genuflect!
Make a cross on your abdomen,
When in Rome do like a Roman;
Ave Maria!
Gee, it's good to see ya.
Gettin' ecstatic an' sorta dramatic an'
Doin' the Vatican Rag!
Tom Lehrer, 1963
Fr Cole reneged on his "definitive" answer by stating "Fr. DiNiola asked me to help out and I thought I was helping a student with an academic exercise" (paraphrase). This, in the context of "Cannon Law". Sheesh- whats with these bishops? At a time in which resolve and dogma are demanded from the church? And the implication is that a "journalist" is calling the shots? Heaven help us.
Usually at the end of every year, I draw up a list of the biggest Vatican stories of the year. This time I'm tempted to compile a list of the year's biggest non-stories, and this week we got a new candidate: the purported "excommunication" of American presidential candidate John Kerry.
Here's what happened. An American Catholic named Marc Balestrieri sent a letter to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith concerning whether Kerry's stand on abortion constituted heresy. (He put two questions to the CDF in Latin, in the style of formal dubia: one as to whether the teaching on abortion is part of the "divine and Catholic faith," thus in effect infallible, the other whether supporting laws favoring abortion is heresy.) The CDF, having never heard of Balestrieri, thought he was a college student working on a research project. Dominican Fr. Augustine DiNoia, the number three official at the CDF, asked a fellow Dominican theologian in Washington, D.C., Fr. Basil Cole, to respond -- not as an officer of the CDF, but simply as a courtesy to the correspondent.
At the outset of his letter to Balestrieri, Cole states that it is an unofficial response. After detailing the various reasons he believes denying the grave immorality of abortion would be heresy, the heart of his four-page reply is the following:
"For anyone to maintain a right to an abortion piggybacks on the heresy and becomes part of its darkness. Consequently, if a Catholic publicly and obstinately supports the civil right to abortion, knowing that the church teaches officially against that legislation, he or she commits that heresy envisioned by Can. 751 of the Code. Provided that presumptions of knowledge of the law and penalty (Can. 15, § 2) and imputability (Can. 1321, § 3) are not rebutted in the external forum, one is automatically excommunicated according to Can. 1364, § 1."
Despite Cole's caution that the letter was "unofficial," Balestrieri went on the Catholic television network EWTN and left the impression that "the Vatican" had declared Kerry excommunicated. Word spread rapidly on the Internet, and ended up in The New York Times and other secular news outlets.
Quickly, both Cole and the Vatican tried to stamp out the story. From the CDF, DiNoia released a two-line statement, which said that the Vatican had no contact with Balestrieri, and that claims of an official Vatican statement on Kerry were without foundation.
For his part, Cole gave the following reply to a query from NCR's Joe Feuerherd: "Neither Fr. DiNoia nor I had any knowledge that [Balestrieri] was going to 'go after' Kerry or any other Catholic figure for their public stance concerning the evil of abortion. I began by mentioning that my letter is a personal and private opinion to him about anyone who would publicly and persistently teach that abortion is not morally prohibited. It in no way is authoritative from the Congregation, nor was I representing the congregation. Its only weight is that of a priest and a theologian who appeals to sacred sources. I was helping out Fr. DiNoia who asked me to do this for him."
Whatever one makes of the issues raised by Balestrieri's original questions, the saga of Cole's response makes an important point. The Vatican has a serious communications problem, because the outside world finds it impossible to distinguish between a formal response and what someone says in an unofficial capacity. If this were the American government, and a response to a letter to the White House came from a deputy insurance commissioner in North Dakota, most people would instinctively understand that it's not terribly authoritative; the same sensitivity does not apply to the Holy See, where somebody can chat up a Swiss Guard and then run around claiming to have a "Vatican response." This is an especially volatile problem in campaign season, where every utterance is presumed to have partisan political significance.
Balestrieri issued a statement Oct. 20 asserting that "although 'formaliter' the response is unofficial, 'materialiter' its contents can never be denied." He has also told reporters that many Vatican officials agree with him. There may be some degree of truth to that -- certainly there are officials in the Holy See who believe the church has to be tougher with public officials who dissent from magisterial teaching. On the specific issue of excommunication in such a circumstance, however, my experience is that there is a wide spread of opinion in the Vatican, and nothing like a consensus.