Posted on 05/14/2007 5:19:23 PM PDT by Alex Murphy
A group of House Democrats yesterday publicly repudiated the Pope’s recent suggestion that politicians who support abortion rights should be excommunicated from the Roman Catholic Church.
Eighteen House Democrats, led by Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), are responding to Pope Benedict XVI’s statement that indicated he would support Mexican bishops if they were to excommunicate Mexican legislators who voted last month to legalize abortion in Mexico City.
The Pope made his remarks last Wednesday during a news conference aboard a plane before he was to begin a five-day visit to Brazil.
“We are concerned with the Pope’s recent statement warning Catholic elected officials that they risk excommunication and would not receive communion for their pro-choice views,” the lawmakers said in a statement issued yesterday. “Advancing respect for life and for the dignity of every human being is, as our church has taught us, our own life’s mission.”
The Democratic lawmakers said that the suggested penalty “offend[s] the very nature of the American experiment and do[es] a great disservice to the centuries of good work the church has done.”
The Pope’s spokesman later clarified the pontiff’s remarks, saying that, ‘’Legislative action in favor of abortion is incompatible with participation in the Eucharist,’’ and politicians who favor abortion rights should ‘’exclude themselves from communion.’’
Other lawmakers were not as politic as the House Democrats.
“I’ve always thought also that those bishops and archbishops who for decades hid pederasts and are now being protected by the Vatican should be indicted,” said Catholic Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), who spoke to reporters last week.
Over the last several years, a few Catholic bishops have threatened to deny communion and other sacraments to politicians who favor abortion rights because their views are not in-step with Church doctrine. The decision to withhold sacraments is made by individual bishops, said Mary Ann Walsh, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.
The debate over whether pro-choice Catholics should receive communion could intensify in the 2008 race for the White House.
In 2004, Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), the first Catholic Democratic presidential nominee since President John Kennedy ran in 1960, received communion one day after a top Vatican cardinal said politicians who back abortion rights should be denied the Eucharist.
Kerry lost the Catholic vote by 13 points to President Bush, according to DemocracyCorps, a Democratic polling firm. There are four 2008 presidential candidates who are Catholic: Sen. Joseph Biden (Del.), Sen. Christopher Dodd (Conn.), Rep. Dennis Kucinich (Ohio), and New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson. They all support abortion rights.
On the Republican side, Sen. Sam Brownback (Kan.), former Wisconsin Gov. Tommy Thompson, and ex-New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani are Catholic. Brownback and Thompson oppose abortion rights while Giuliani favors them.
In February, former Sen. John Edwards (D-N.C.) was under pressure to fire two female bloggers who had criticized the Catholic Church before joining the campaign. While Edwards decided not to fire the two women, one subsequently resigned.
Some Catholic organizations have criticized the Pope’s statement.
Jon O’Brien, the executive director of Catholics for a Free Choice, said, “[Pope Benedict] is still putting dogma ahead of the lived reality of the Catholic laity… it will only push Catholic politicians further from the institutional church.”
The House Democrats’ letter mirrors a “statement of principles” that 55 Democrats, encompassing a broad ideological swath of the caucus, signed last year. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Calif.), who is Catholic, signed the letter, as did anti-abortion rights Reps. Bart Stupak (Mich.) and Jim Langevin (R.I.).
In the statement of principles, Democratic lawmakers wrote that they agreed with the Roman Catholic Church’s position on the “undesirability of abortion” and that “each of us is committed to reducing the number of unwanted pregnancies and creating an environment with policies that encourage pregnancies to be carried to term.”
Meanwhile, Catholic voters’ attitudes towards abortion are changing, according to an ABC-Washington Post poll released in March. Only 10 percent of those polled believe that abortion should be legal in all cases, a 16 percent drop since 2004. But there has been a corresponding rise in the number who said it should be legal in most cases.
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That old pesky conscience must be bothersome.
I don't know where you've been, but the Church has been very vocal against abortion since 1973, immediately after Roe-v-Wade. That's why pro-abortion activists tried to have the pro-life idea dismissed as a 'religious' argument, since, at the beginning, the Church was behind much of the opposition to abortion.
I understand that sentiment. But, for its worth, I think you have a duty to be there, to support the Church even when it is going through its lowest periods. We talk about 'fair weather fans', but the kind of loyalty we owe to the Church is incommensurably greater than what we owe to any sports team. If everyone simply bailed 'until things improved', the Church would, if it were possible, just fade away. But our continued presence and example may be part of that which is necessary for helping the Church through her times of weakness and darkness. The gifts that we each have been given are to be shared. And if your gift is moral superiority, then even this is a gift to be shared with the Church, for the good of the Church. "If one part suffers, every part suffers with it." (1 Cor 12:26) We should suffer *with* the Church, not from the sidelines. And when one part is missing, every part misses its effects. Just some thoughts, for what its worth.
-A8
Well the Pope wants them excommunicated, and most people I know think they ought to be shot. So I’d say they come out on the easier side of things with the Pope.
“The Dims will try to twist this into a case of the Pope violating the non existent separation of church and state clause”
Since when do individual constitutions of various countries have authority over the religious leader of a worldwide religion?
The complete ignorance of how the Church operates and the authority of the Pope regarding teachings of the Church is astounding.
The democrats are starting to resemble the commies in China who managed to establish themselves as church authorities (pretty amusing considering their atheism and all...)
By 2004 any reasonable person could see that churchgoers had already been ‘onboard’ for many years to refusing communion and more to abortion supporters.
I put quotes around ‘onboard’ because no one in the church had provided an ‘onboard’ platform for them to stand on. The congregation members built that platform, and the church leaders were the ones who finally got onboard.
Prove my above assertions wrong by showing me where the churches led the way in the 70’s, 80’s or even the 90’s (when the pro-life movement began to really sway public opinion) by putting some teeth into supporting the doctorine of life.
You can’t, because the record is what it is, a shameful record of what they didn’t do.
We did that to our children with that same evil argument about the public schools.
I'm very slow at times, but not stupid. I'll never purposely make that mistake twice.
So separation of church and state means that the Pope and bishops must give up their rights of free speech? As Mitt Romney correctly pointed out, the Catholic Church is a private association, and Catholic bishops can do or say whatever they want.
Amusing indeed.
I’m hesitant to enter this discussion, especially on the side of the bishops, because frankly, the bishops’ records have been far from glorious on this issue, and what’s more, it’s lots easier to bash them than to defend them.
Nonetheless, I think that perhaps you paint with too broad a brush.
The first thing to make clear is that your view of a monolithic response from Catholic bishops towards the politics of abortion is false.
The response of bishops to the politics of abortion ranges everywhere from non-existent to excommunication. There are some bishops who seem to have said little about “Catholic” politicians and people who are involved with politics who embrace pro-abortion views. We also have Bishop Bruskewitz who formally excommunicated members of so-called “Catholic” pro-abortion groups in his own diocese. He did that about a decade ago, a few years into his reign in his diocese. The Vatican has upheld his actions.
There are also some bishops who have called out pro-abortion politicians by name and told them that they might not receive Holy Communion.
These are few in number, but they refute the idea of a monolithic response.
As well, many bishops have stated generally that pro-abortion politicians should not approach Holy Communion. Although they haven’t singled out specific politicians for specific bans, they have spoken out and stated clearly that pro-abort politicians should not receive Holy Communion. There are many bishops who have done this, including Cardinal O’Malley of Boston.
I believe it’s fair to criticize this set of bishops that they haven’t gone far enough. Rather than expressing a general rule, my view is that they should take the time to specifically ban specific persons from Holy Communion, as some other bishops have done.
It isn’t quite practical to formally ban by name ALL pro-abort politicians, but perhaps each bishop could take the top ten offenders in his diocese.
However, dealing with the specific politics of abortion shouldn’t be primarily the role of the hierarchy. Participation in the political arena is primarily the work of the laity. Thus, it is right that it should be the laity who take the lead in the politics of abortion. The bishops have taught clearly and specifically what are the teachings and principles of the Church in this regard. One could wish for more spine from them where the political intersects the ecclesiastical, but it’s false to say they have done nothing or have not done anything to help lead the way.
Beyond the strictly political, the bishops, collectively, have done other things regarding abortion. Since the late ‘70s or the ‘80s, the movement in many dioceses to provide assistance to women in crisis pregnancies has enjoyed the support, spiritual, emotional, and financial, of many bishops.
This extends to efforts in this area by non-Catholics. I worked with a Protestant pro-life organization back in the early 1990s. Its leaders told me flat-out that it was members of the Catholic hierarchy and Catholic laity who helped them get off the ground in their initial efforts in the 1980s.
Now, it’s true, this didn’t make any headlines. It’s true that if I mentioned the name of the organization, not many Catholics, not many folks at all would recognize its name. Nonetheless, it provides support for a couple of thousand crisis pregnancy centers.
The bottom line is that many of our bishops HAVE lent significant support to charitable works to assist women in crisis pregnancies. Many bishops feel more comfortable performing this more traditional role - doing works of charity - in relationship to abortion than getting out in front of the politics of abortion.
Thus, many of our bishops have led in important ways on the issue of abortion. For a very long time.
Could they, should they have done more? I believe that they should have.
Did they do nothing? Did they entirely abdicate their leadership role? No, they didn’t.
Could all of us have done more?
Probably.
I know I could.
sitetest
I love this graphic! Thanks for the laugh.
There was never a moral question about whether it's the crime of homicide to deliberately kill a living human being. There did remain a fact-question concerning embryology: when can we know that there is a living being in the woman's womb?
Until fairly recently, there was no way to know until the woman felt movement.
Even a few centuries ago, the common medical guess was that the father's semen coagulated in the womb, like curds forming in milk, stuck together in clumps until it formed a baby-shape about as big as a walnut, and then the baby-shaped clump came alive and started kicking mama!
So, knowing that any sabotage of God's work in the creation of new life is morally wrong, the Church said that the destructive interruption of pregnancy at any stage is always a serious sin; and additionally, if you knew that the baby was alive, it's murder.
Since the discovery of DNA and the observation that fertilization constitutes Day One of every human person's lifespan, the Church (being reality-based) teaches that all embryo-killing is murder.
OK, Pope Balding_Eagle.
Same here. Amen.
I'm no Pope, not ANY kind of church leader, not even a Sunday School teacher or member.
I no longer attend church.
Why should I? Our 'leaders' have been AWOL for many, many years.
For the past decades the congregations led the way through the abortion wilderness. They've been left to find their own way, because the 'leadership' either lacked the knowledge, or more likely the courage to do what had to be done.
I'm ever so grateful that the Pope and other church 'leaders' have decided to follow in the footsteps of their 'flock'.
Quotes around 'leaders' and 'flock' due to our upside-down religious world.
Thank you so much for that post.
I will accept everything you said at face value, (because I want good news on this issue) and I am so pleased to hear about things I have not heard about before.
The only history I know (until your post) is a history of ‘do nothing’.
There IS hope, in fact there WAS hope all along.
Thank you again. Your post made my day.
Thanks.
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