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Cardinal Ratzinger said, "The minister of Holy Communion must refuse to distribute it." He did not say 'could,' or 'may,' but that he "must." Barbara Kralis Barbara Kralis July 6, 2004 Is it possible that after so much scandal and hurt in the Catholic Church, Bishop Wilton Gregory and Cardinal Theodore McCarrick would withhold and distort an important memo written by the head of the Vatican's second most important dicastery of the Roman Curia? [1] The Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, wrote the memo in English expressly for the USCCB's use...

Apparently somebody didn’t get the memo. Reader Geoff Garvey of Murrell’s Inlet, S.C., which is in the Charleston diocese, tells me that a eucharistic minister there turned away a communicant who wore a John Kerry for President button to the Communion rail. Charleston Bishop Robert J. Baker had declared that Catholics in public life, especially elected ones, who didn’t support church teaching on the sanctity of human life “are not to be admitted to Holy Communion.” That came Aug. 4 in a joint letter from Baker, Archbishop John F. Donoghue of Atlanta, Ga., and Bishop Peter J. Jugis of Charlotte,...

Tridentine Mass, Eucharistic Ministers by Thomas E. Woods, Jr. The spirit of innovation of the past forty years has dulled the sensibilities of many churchmen to the seriousness and gravity of their almost routine ruptures with tradition. If it is pointed out to them that some innovation would obviously have been detested by the entire assembly of saints, they either do not care (an attitude that at one time would have been unthinkable for a Catholic) or they actually claim that we have made "progress" since their time. Such is the level of our spiritual idiocy that an age as...