Ave Maria Law priest takes bishops to task for failing to deny Communion to Biden, Pelosi, et. al.

ROME, March 21, 2013 (LifeSiteNews.com) - There had been a little off track betting going on among pro-life Catholics ( a tautology for sure) as to whether or not Vice Joe Biden and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi would receive Holy Communion at the Mass of Installation for Pope Francis in Rome. on Tuesday. The yeas far out polled they nays, and the yeas proved to be right. It was really a no-brainer!

Biden and Pelosi and other pro-abortion politicians have been thumbing their noses at church teaching for many years now. Even though it has been repeated ad infinitum that their behavior is contrary to Catholic teaching regarding the sanctity of human life from conception to natural death, they have continually presented themselves at the altar rail. They have never been denied the sacrament.

Some bishops have personally advised them not to receive Communion, since their public stand aids and abets a heinous crime. These warnings are, however, deemed pastoral and have no teeth. There is no unanimity among the bishops as to their imposition and whether or not an offending politician can be denied the sacrament if he or she presents themselves for Communion.

The timidity of the bishops stems from the lack of agreement as to how a bishop should apply Canon 915 is to be interpreted and used. The canon states, "Those who are excommunicated or interdicted after the imposition or declaration of the penalty and others who obstinately persist in manifest grave sin are not to be admitted to Holy Communion." This becomes problematic for two reasons: first, because many bishops are loathe to accuse politicians of grave sin; and second, because excommunication is a formal juridical act that effectively cuts off the offender from the sacramental life of the Church. It also means the denial of a Catholic funeral.

Since there is no direct mandate from the Vatican, most bishops don’t want to take the risk of not being supported in their decision.

No doubt there would also be a strong public outcry protesting freedom of conscience and the obligation of politicians to represent their constituents. Of course, there will also be references to the Mario Cuomo mantra, “I am personally opposed to abortion but …” given at Notre Dame, in 1984, in which he cleverly tried to separate religious belief and public morality. This speech was condemned by Cardinal John O’Connor, since it violated traditional Catholic teaching on the importance of public officials to form their consciences in light of the Church’s moral teachings and the obligation to enact legislation in accord with it. Cuomo, however, was never counseled not to receive Communion. Ever since, more and more Catholics have decided that they can make their own decisions as to what is right and wrong morally.

Politicians such as Biden and Pelosi have been stubborn and contumacious in their pro-abortion policies and in presenting themselves for reception of the Eucharist. They know that the American bishops, for the most part, prefer a “pastoral approach,” which means basically let’s talk to them and help them to see the error of their ways. It has not worked, and there is no indication that it will. The topic of this essay is proof enough! They also know that Catholic priests are instructed not to cause a scene on the Communion line and that the person be permitted to receive. Thus, they opt to take advantage of these charitable loopholes.

There is a solution and perhaps some hope for stronger enforcement of Church policy on offending pols. The Vatican should clearly state that politicians who promote a culture of death, abortion, and euthanasia, are subject to excommunication by their bishop. Pope-Emeritus Benedict XVI made an unofficial statement on a trip to Mexico, in 2007, stating that excommunication for pro choice legislators was not arbitrary and is part of canon law. This would strengthen Canon 915 and some bishops’ backbones.

It is well known that Pope Francis forbade pro- choice politicians from receiving Holy Communion in his diocese, in Argentina. Perhaps the new Pope can move this project along?

By the bishops refusing to take strong action, such as excommunication, politicians will continue their “in your face” attitude toward the church and her leaders. Such a failure will also continue to allow Catholics and people of good will to be scandalized. Even worse, it gives the impression that others may follow the behavior of wayward politicians with impunity.

Biden and Pelosi only did at the Vatican what they have been allowed to do at home. As the great Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonheoffer stated so well, dear bishops; Not to act is to act!

You can fiddle and preen and attack the pro-life voting Protestants while Catholics vote for abortion, and we continue to import pro-abortion voting democrats by the millions, and state by state falls to the catholic vote, like California did.

I don’t understand that position, but it explains why the left begs for more catholic immigration.

They haven’t “excommunicated” themselves and who cares about internal theological arguments within their denomination anyway.

What is of political concern is the Catholic vote, and what it does to America and what it means, and the fact that we are importing millions of those voters and that the left bases their hope for the future on the Catholic and secular vote.

If we keep importing Catholics, then what does that mean in the voting booth, it means that it is all over.

They haven’t “excommunicated” themselves . . ."

Be sure to correct Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI when he asks you about Canon Law or Church Doctrine.

The Pope was asked whether he supported Mexican Church leaders threatening to excommunicate leftist parliamentarians who last month voted to legalize abortion in Mexico City.

"Yes, this excommunication was not an arbitrary one but is allowed by Canon (church) law which says that the killing of an innocent child is incompatible with receiving communion, which is receiving the body of Christ," he said.

"They (Mexican Church leaders) did nothing new, surprising or arbitrary. They simply announced publicly what is contained in the law of the Church... which expresses our appreciation for life and that human individuality, human personality is present from the first moment (of life)".

Under Church law, someone who knowingly does or backs something which the Church considers a grave sin, such as abortion, inflicts what is known as "automatic excommunication" on themselves.

You might want to notify the Pope and tell him that he wasn’t supposed to give Biden and Pelosi communion the other day, and you may want to let him know to update his figures on how many Catholics live in the United States, and reduce that official number by about 56%.

Do you expect to see the Vatican releasing new numbers of the catholic population in America, which are only 44% of the current numbers?

Do you think that the fact that 56% of American Catholics don’t exist at all, that they have been excommunicated, might be reported somewhere?

Catholicism is not a denomination. It is the Church that Jesus founded on Peter and the Apostles in the Gospel. All others have broken away. Yes there are many who are not “good” Catholics and there will be up until the end. But to believe Jesus is to believe what He said,’ The gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” The Catholic Church is Holy partially because most of the people in it are already in Heaven.

I believe that the Pope corrected that statement and that the transcript was produced changing the language of what you posted.

“Church officials later said the pope may have thought the Mexican bishops had issued a formal declaration of excommunication for the legislators — something Mexican Cardinal Norberto Rivera has said he has no intention of doing.

Benedict’s spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, said the pope was not setting a new policy, and did not intend to formally excommunicate anyone — a rare process under church law that is separate from the doctrine of self-excommunication.

“Since excommunication hasn’t been declared by the Mexican bishops, the pope has no intention himself of declaring it,” Lombardi said in a statement approved by the pope.

But Lombardi added that politicians who vote in favor of abortion should not receive the sacrament of Holy Communion. “Legislative action in favor of abortion is incompatible with participation in the Eucharist. ... Politicians exclude themselves from Communion.”

Pressed again to say whether the lawmakers were excommunicated, Lombardi reiterated: “No, they exclude themselves from Communion.”

Nobody is attacking the pro-life voting protestants.

You, however, show an extremely shallow grasp on the subject of voter demographics if you blame the current situation on "the Catholic vote." Look at the migration patterns in Ohio, for example, and see that liberal sections of Ohio were settled by New Englanders (yankee Protestants, many of them), years and years ago, before liberalism as we know it existed. There are much deeper issues to be examined here than religion. You are simply conflating a single factor, religion, more specifically a religion you don't like, with the entire issue of liberal voting patterns.

The breakdown of voting Catholics, while leaning left, is still not to far off half-and-half.

The Protestant vote, while leaning right, is again not very very far off half-and-half (remember, the Methodist, Lutheran, Presbyterian, Black Baptist, and United Church Christ? All INSTITUTIONALLY liberal).

Furthermore, the left isn't begging for "Catholic immigration." I suppose by "Catholic" you mean Mexican, but the left doesn't care whether they are Catholic or not. They'll just as happily take muslim Somalis, buddhist Asians or Protestant Canadians.

The Protestant vote is only really conservative if you just look at Evangelicals while ignoring the mainline Protestant vote...Which you can't.

The democrats have only won the Protestant vote 3 times in history, 1932, 1936, and 1964.

The republicans have only won the catholic vote about 5 times in history.

The left and conservatives both know that catholic or non-Protestant immigration means the victory of the left over America, and that is why the left rewrote the immigration laws.

Democrats wrote a law to replace the American voter.

From unionizing government, to Vietnam, to the 1965 Immigration Act, JFK was the end of us.

“However, if there is one man who can take the most credit for the 1965 act, it is John F. Kennedy. Kennedy seems to have inherited the resentment his father Joseph felt as an outsider in Boston’s WASP aristocracy. He voted against the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952, and supported various refugee acts throughout the 1950s. In 1958 he wrote a book, A Nation of Immigrants, which attacked the quota system as illogical and without purpose, and the book served as Kennedy’s blueprint for immigration reform after he became president in 1960. In the summer of 1963, Kennedy sent Congress a proposal calling for the elimination of the national origins quota system. He wanted immigrants admitted on the basis of family reunification and needed skills, without regard to national origin. After his assassination in November, his brother Robert took up the cause of immigration reform, calling it JFK’s legacy. In the forward to a revised edition of A Nation of Immigrants, issued in 1964 to gain support for the new law, he wrote, “I know of no cause which President Kennedy championed more warmly than the improvement of our immigration policies.” Sold as a memorial to JFK, there was very little opposition to what became known as the Immigration Act of 1965.”

"The democrats have only won the Protestant vote 3 times in history, 1932, 1936, and 1964. The republicans have only won the catholic vote about 5 times in history."

Thats not the right way of thinking about it. Until the 1900 or so, the democrats were the party of rural, traditionally-minded people and the republicans were the social-tinkering urban-vote period-liberals (the populist party merging with the unions and farmer's alliances, then being led by Williams Jenning Bryan to merge with the democrat party, flipped the parties.)

But none that matters now. What matters is the modern and current election cycle.

Like I said, both the Catholic and Protestant vote is roughly half-democrat, half-republican. Percentage speaking more Protestants vote republican, but not significantly more. Yet your arguments seems to boil down to "neener neener its still more" rather than addressing the wider problem of a population-wide shift towards the left.

No, the reality is that the democrats never win the Protestant vote, and they almost never lose the Catholic vote, and they may never lose it again, in fact they probably won’t.

Catholic immigration is the end of the pro-life movement.

California went Catholic, and the hope of the left is that Texas will also, then they own the presidency forever.

If we keep importing Catholics, then what does that mean in the voting booth, it means that it is all over.

These "imported Catholics" (from south of the border?) you apparently disapprove of have merely served as "useful idiots" for the Protestant marxist president and his henchmen to manipulate for their own ends. Both political parties deliberately ignore the ramifications of the lax border policy, refusing to admit to the fact that if we have no border, we effectively have no country.

Whether the illegals are Catholics (or not) is really immaterial. Mexican voting patterns are a reflection of the Marxist culture that developed in the 1920's as a result of the Mexican Revolution (which the Church didn't support, as the Church opposes Marxism - see "Dominum et Vivificantem" if you're interested). The Church suffered horribly under the Marxist government, and it appears that under Obama history is beginning to repeat itself on the northern side of the border.

They haven’t “excommunicated” themselves

Of course they've excommunicated themselves. The Church has basically said to these people that they're on the road to hell as a result of their willful rejection of God's grace if they fail to repent.

immigration from a more pure Catholic nation, founded as a Catholic nation by Catholics, hasn’t made any difference in it.

One cannot deliberately ignore history and Church teaching and expect to be taken seriously. Catholicism and Marxism are incompatible. Mexico has NOT been "a pure Catholic nation" for a long time now.

Here is an example of what marxist atheists did to Catholics in Mexico:

The pro life movement is stronger than ever. Perhaps you should by the next Right to Life March in DC next year.

Romney won more of the white Catholic vote than Bush did in 2004.

Romney won White Catholics 60 percent to 40 percent. Hispanic Catholics are tipping more Catholics to Democrats.

However, they aren’t Catholics in the eyes of the faithful.

You cannot make up things that I am not saying, Mexico is very much a catholic nation and always has been, it was as Catholic as America was Protestant before the mid 1800s, Mexico was 96% Catholic when I used to go there so frequently.

Being 96% Catholic is very pure, almost as pure as America was when it was founded, I didn’t say that the government is run by the Vatican, or that the Catholic people of Mexico have done a good job with their nation, just that they were a purely Catholic nation, meaning the denominational church membership of it’s people.

How many Catholic populations have adopted or become communist, or Marxist and didn’t mention it, I don’t know, I never looked into it, is there a lot of that in the most Catholic region of the world?

The pro-life movement is losing elections, even the GOP is threatening to abandon it.

White Catholics? Is the Catholic church “white”, or just the good Catholics?

Some conservative Catholics are defending and covering for the pro-abortion left by trying to conceal the Catholic vote and deny that it is majority democrat, thereby blocking efforts and awareness that they themselves should be leading, conservatives need to know how Catholics vote, and what millions more of them means to our goals.

It always has been the same, for more than a 100 years before Hispanics recently started arriving.

Hispanic Catholics aren’t changing that, since they only recently got here in large numbers the effect that they are having is keeping the Catholic vote in it’s traditional place, as the dwindling number of whites in the Catholic denomination, have in recent years become a little more conservative.

Besides, whether white or Hispanic, they still belong to the same denomination, Catholic, in fact Mexico has always been an almost purely Catholic nation.

White Catholics make a huge difference actually. Like I said, Romney won more White Catholics then even George Bush did in 04.

In fact,overall Bush won Catholics by 5 in 04, McCain loss Catholics by 9 in 08, and then Romney loss by 2 in 12. The Hispanic Catholics are the ones breaking for Obama.

It’s the equivalent of including black Protestants in the Protestant breakdown.

Certain demographics worship big government more than they did our Lord and Savior.

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