Catholic Church Purging Its Ranks of Infidels
Beginning, of course, with U. S. Rep. Patrick Kennedy of Rhode Island.
It seems Infidel Kennedy supports abortion rights. A moral institution like the Catholic Church simply cannot countenance such disagreement with the Infallible Ex-Nazi Pope. Maybe the Church will next bar those using contraception. Which will leave the pedophile priests, who are still welcome in the Church, as the only people ‘getting any’:
From the Associated Press story:
Kennedy could appeal the decision to officials in the Vatican, but the hierarchy of the Catholic church is unlikely to overturn a bishop, said Michael Sean Winters, a church observer and author of “Left At the Altar: How Democrats Lost The Catholics And How Catholics Can Save The Democrats.”
“It’s really bad theology,” said Winters, who opposes abortion. “You’re turning the altar rail into a battle field, a political battlefield no less, and it does a disservice to the Eucharist.”
The dispute between the two men began in October when Kennedy in an interview on CNSNews.com criticized the nation’s Catholic bishops for threatening to oppose a massive expansion of the nation’s health care system unless it included tighter restrictions on federally funded abortion.
Here’s what Man On Boy of God Bishop Thomas Tobin had to say to Kennedy:
“Sorry, you can’t chalk it up to an ‘imperfect humanity.’ Your position is unacceptable to the Church and scandalous to many of our members. It absolutely diminishes your Communion with the Church,”
Priests forcing altar boys into having sex=OK by the Church.
A public official publicly supporting abortion rights=Scandalous.
Good to know the Church never (pardon the expression) deviates from its dogma.
I think Patrick should go to every Mass and invite everyone who supports him to remain praying with him in the pews during Communion.
If memory serves the Catholic Church has also denied communion to divorcees and probably a few other groups as well. Perhaps thats better than outright expulsion as practised by Jehovahs Witnesses or the Amish. I suggest those rejected consider Atheism, it’s simple, requires no donation and you can practice it anywhere theres not a church/temple or synagogue.
I think Patrick should go to every Mass and invite everyone who supports him to remain praying with him in the pews during Communion.
… and to keep their wallets closed during collection.
So is the Catholic Church ready to shrink itself out of existence then?
sounds like another group of radical religious nutbags.
Actually the Church is picking up wingnut converts like Newt.
The Church has left the Kennedys. A Church that doesn’t have room for the Kennedy’s doesn’t hold much interest for me. This may be the last straw for my own shredded Catholicism.
Which also means that the Kennedys ought to turn this church loose and let them survive without their money.
I think that this is the last straw for my own shredded Catholicism too. There’s always the Episcopalians or Anglicans who are far more interested in their communities rather than their politics.
“I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute, where no Catholic prelate would tell the president (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote; where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference…”
John F. Kennedy
September 12, 1960
How far, how terribly far, both the church and the nation have fallen.
“This may be the last straw for my own shredded Catholicism.,,,
anon as a reconvering catholic myself let me asure you it takes a lot of shredding but the endresult is clearer vision …
Which also means that the Kennedys ought to turn this church loose and let them survive without their money.
It’s not the Kennedy’s Catholicism or their money that matters. It’s the alienation of all the other Catholics who support and think like the Kennedys. Losing the participation and the money of liberal Catholics will doom the American Church.
They’ve been trying this since 2002, but now it looks like they have another headache to deal with. Outing hypocritical gay clergy who vote against basic rights for all Americans. And I think a woman’s right to choose is one of those rights. Take a look for yourselves.
http://churchouting.org/
Cajun – I cannot bring myself to outing priests. Seriously, I don’t see how that does anything except deny them the ability to earn a living in their chosen profession. We all work for organizations that have views or practices that are different than our own.
[snort!] Cassandra wrote:
Such an informed group: the Episcopalians are the Anglicans! The Episcopal Church is the Anglican Church in America. 🙂 Of course, the Episcopal Church in the US is already in the process of tearing itself apart over the ordination of openly homosexual priests who live with their same-sex partners. So far, at least four entire Episcopal dioceses have separated themselves from the official Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States, aligning the,selves with more traditional diocese in Africa and Latin America. And now, Pope Benedict XVI has issued instructions allowing easier reabsorbtion of individual Anglican churches, or even whole diocese, back into the fold of the Catholic Church.
Wikwox wrote:
No, the Catholic Church says that those who have divorced and remarried are not in a proper state of grace to receive the Eucharist. If you have a mortal sin on your conscience, and haven’t gone to confession and received absolution, you should not receive the Host.
The Church doesn’t keep communion from the divorced. But the loopholes get, well, silly.
You can’t have communion if you married a divorced Catholic. But You can have communion if you married a divorced atheist, or someone who was not married by a clergyman. You can have communion if you marry a divorced Catholic, and that spouse dies, or your previous spouse dies. (Talk about praying for a happy death!)
If you are not Catholic, divorced, remarried and then become Catholic, well, the slate is clean, the other marriages never happened and — voila! just like Newt — you can receive Communion!
In my (Catholic) opinion, it’s gotten ridiculous and hard to defend. Throw annulment into the mix, and it’s impossible to defend.
And now we toss into the mix the accepted Episcopalian congregations, which have never had a problem with divorce and remarriage, and who will now be Catholics in good standing, if they wish.
The communion loophole for Patrick Kennedy is also large: just go to Mass in Washington, DC, virginia or Maryland. Or New York — where somehow Rudy Guiliani of public affair, divorce and remarriage is still receiving communion.
The Church in the US is going to have a substantial problem if it keeps hunting down and eating its own.
And as is his tradition, Dana is the one ill-informed — There is no Anglican Church — there is an Anglican Communion that country or other associations of local parishes join. The difference between using Episcopal vs Anglican used to be a shorthand on how traditional a service a congregation adhered to but now is a full blown political split based on how conservative the locals are. There is even a spanking new True Anglican Communion formed here to try to formalize these new politics. I was using the terms in the shorthand for how traditional services may be.
The Episcopal Church doesn’t expel members for disagreement, nor ascribes infallibility to a human prelate.
It has decided that women and openly gay folks can be ordained. These decisions have been vindicated, as women priests are doing damn good jobs, and gay priests no longer have to hide their humanity. Some disagree and have let life proceed.
Others choose to wet their pants in public over the issue. You want ’em, you got ’em, Ratz.
How sad it must be told you can’t play cannibal anymore by pretending to drink human blood and eat human flesh.
Some Anglicans are leaving the Anglican Church on their own. The Catholic Church may get married priests because they’ll probably be accepting Anglican priests who are leaving because the acceptance of gays and women. So I guess priest celibacy is less important than non-acceptance of gay people.
I find the whole Catholic Church stand on divorce hypocritical. You can’t be divorced but you can be “annulled.” So annulled means the marriage didn’t exist and I guess that means the children are just mistakes.
UI– I think it’s hypocritical, too, but it doesn’t have anything to do with the church’s stand on children. Children born “out of wedlock” are baptized and welcome … the church has never wanted sex outside marriage, but it doesn’t penalize the kids.
What’s hypocritical about annulment is that it is not uniformly granted, the reasons often are specious, and it completely undercuts the marriage that the church says is so sacred.
Mrs Isotope wrote:
The Catholic Church has been accepting married clergy converts for many years. Normally, they are limited to being parochial vicars, but some have become pastors.
Priestly celibacy is not a doctrine of faith, but an internal discipline in the Latin (Roman)-rite churches. The Eastern Catholic Churches have married priests, but their bishops are — last time I knew, anyway — all celibates.
The Church accepts homosexuals, and does not hold that homosexuality is a sin; Church doctrine holds that acting upon homosexual impulses is a sin. Church doctrine holds that all unmarried persons should be chaste; with homosexuals, since they cannot marry, lifelong chastity is the expectation.
I know that y’all don’t like to hear that, but homosexual activity is explicitly condemned in the Bible, and the Church does hold, amazingly enough, that scripture is authoritative.
Oh, Yikes, let’s not go into what’s condemned in the Old Testament. We do Friday bacon blogging here…..
“The Church accepts homosexuals, and does not hold that homosexuality is a sin;”
yes and no: the church won’t say homosexuality of itself is a sin, but it has just decided NOT to accept into the priesthood anyone who is homosexual, celibate or not. That’s pretty darned closed to saying gay is sin: at the very least, the church just made celibate gay men second-class men.
The Roman Catholic Church keeps deliberately violating its tax exempt status. When is the IRS going to obey the law and deny it to them?
Meanwhile, the Vatican has strongly condemned the new Twilight movie, New Moon, calling the film a “deviant moral vacuum.”
Good to see they’re still out there fighting the good fight against the growing threat of vampirism in our young people. When will they take on Hannah Montana?
Even when I was a kid the Catholic Review was reviewing movies for the moral suitability for Catholics. My parents didn’t pay much attention to it, but my grandmother did. When I was a teen, I started to pay attention to it — so that I would know what movies to try to see… 😉
Ahhh Lib you finally hit the nail on the head
“The Roman Catholic Church keeps deliberately violating its tax exempt status. When is the IRS going to obey the law and deny it to them?”
Bingo !! The can do what ever they want to, refuse their own flock all kinds of “rights” . one of our business, but when the roam the halls of congress, like they did last week in order to make policy,
THATS WHEN I GRINGE….they should immideately be dtripped of their tax-exempt status.
We are not a theocracy YET
The church holds that the death penalty is morally wrong, but what Catholic legislator is asked to stop partaking of the Eucharist for supporting the death penalty? None that I have heard. Just abortion. Just what forces a woman to endure an unwanted pregnancy. It’s about punishing women and sex outside of marriage.
Pointing out that substantial numbers of married women have abortions, the majority of women who have them in this country already have one or more children, and 27% of them identify as Catholic. Punishing women, for sure, but not just unwed teens.
Amazing, isn’t it, the amount of contempt you have for religious believers who actually believe what their faith teaches, and for religious leaders who actually attempt to hold their followers accountable.
Too bad you don’t make such a strong stnd about Islam when its followers engage in terrorism, honor killings, and other acts of barbarism.
pretty sure people are pointing out various individuals and sects in American Catholicism. just like how there are individuals and sects in Islam. This is a country that CONSTANTLY violates its own guidelines in concern to separation of church and state. And it is let go most of the time because it is usually superficial, like making christmas and easter national holidays…. or it is something with most religions and moral standards agree with. But when a member of the clergy threatens an elected official….. who makes policy for people not of his own religion … with pretty much what amounts to the wrath of god… he is imposing his beliefs on the voting public. THAT is a violation.