(not just the pat answer, “he excommunicated himself” but a real public excommunication)
“.....challenged this grosteque move with a penetrating question....”
I would not use the word “penetrating” while discussing the issue of so-called “gay marriage.”
“Self excommunication” is debatably worse because there’s no medicinal component. It just IS, and you keep doing whatever you’re doing that leaves you outside the fold, and maybe you never come back.
At least formal excommunication makes it almost certain that someone will have to stop and consider what they’re doing and why they’ve received this corrective action.
I think the Church is worried about opening up a Pandora’s Box of excommunications if they tackle it in earnest. i.e., if you excommunicate Nancy Pelosi, well, then you have to excommunicate Chris Dodd and joe Biden the Kennedys and then Tony Blair gets excommunicated three seconds after converting to the faith, and then you’ve got Silvio Burlosconi and now lets move over to Notre Dame and DePaul and Georgetown and now you have to go after the dissident convents and where does it end?
Benedict, above all, hates dissent, hates heresy, hates politicians who mock and denigrate the faith. But I think there’s a much larger issue - especially in this plugged-in age of communication, and that’s taking the Church - which is already a target - and turning it into an overt enemy of the state that must be crushed...
It’s really a hard situation, and ultimately, it’s a climate that politicians and high-profile people will regret creating, since they have deprived themselves of the medicine (formal excommunication) that will get them on the right path.
I consider “he excommunicated himself” to be the biggest copout on the part of the RCC.
I’m with you, but his name is Benedict XVI.
I think the Church gives too much leeway to Americans.
Americans think everything is a ‘democracy’ (aka Mob Rule). They have educated themselves out of understanding that the Pope is the Pope, the HEAD of the Catholic Church on earth, the Vicar of Christ. Being the Head of the Church is not a popularity contest. And unlike “laws” you don’t like, so you ignore (like speed limits), the Laws of the Church are made in Stone (2 Tablets) and are backed up by The Bible, The Magisterium, and Tradition. They are irrefutable and unchangeable. But you wouldn’t know that if you live in “Cafeteria Catholic” America.
True Catholicism, Pure Catholicism is not being taught in many Diocese in the USofA.
And this IS to the detriment of this Country. Catholics supported the Abortion-Euthanasia Presidential Candidate and STILL do. Even AFTER Pope Benedict XVI said that Abortion trumps Social Justice. Catholics ignored him. To their peril.
Catholic Congress people must think that God will give them some kind of special dispensation for all the lies they’ve told on the House and Senate Floor . . . for the “good” of the collective. They don’t know the heart of God or the heart of the Pope. Abortion trumps Social Justice. Abortion kills the very people for whom Social Justice is needed.