Cardinal Says “The Democrat Party Has Lost Its Soul”
By Tom Barrett (04/12/04)
Easter is a holiday. The origin of the word “holiday” is the phrase “holy day.” Easter is still a holy day for Christians the world over. But John Kerry has chosen to defame this holy day for political purposes.
Archbishop Sean O’Malley, who is in authority over Kerry’s diocese of Boston, has stated clearly that elected officials who support abortion should not receive communion. He said that Catholic politicians who support abortion are “in a state of grave sin and cannot properly take Communion.” Kerry defied his Archbishop and presented himself for communion at Boston’s Paulist Center on Easter Sunday.
Apparently Kerry felt his political ambitions were important enough to desecrate Easter Sunday by bringing his politics into his church. He could have avoided this by simply attending mass but not presenting himself for communion. Catholic doctrine does not require a person attending mass to take communion. But he knew he would lose face and political points if he did not receive communion after the recent controversy. Unfortunately, Archbishop O’Malley backed down and allowed the unrepentant Kerry to take communion.
There had been much speculation recently about whether Kerry would publicly flout his church’s authority on Easter. He has recently attended several Protestant churches, which has led some to speculate he would attend a church more open to his position on abortion on Easter Sunday.
On Palm Sunday Kerry attended the Charles Street African Methodist Episcopal Church in Dorchester, Mass. During the service the pastor, Gregory Groover said from the pulpit, "We're thankful that there's going to be a revolution in this country...a new movement And we say, God, bring him on, the next president of the United States." If a conservative pastor spoke words like that from the pulpit regarding George Bush, the IRS would be knocking down its doors the next day threatening to repeal its tax-exempt status.
In February, Archbishop Raymond Burke of St. Louis advised Kerry not to "present himself for communion" at any church in the city. "I would have to admonish him not to present himself for Communion," said Burke. "If his archbishop has told him he should not present himself for Communion, he shouldn't. I agree with Archbishop O'Malley." Kerry sidestepped the communion issue in St. Louis by attending a Missionary Baptist Church.
Commenting on the subject, Cardinal Francis George of Chicago said the "great scandal" of the Democratic Party "is that there's no pro-life caucus. A party that historically has been concerned about the weakest among us doesn't permit any freedom of speech around the question of abortion," he said. "One can say, as I have, that the Democratic Party has lost its soul."
Many of Kerry's positions defy his church’s doctrines. He supports human stem-cell research; abortion-on-demand, including partial-birth abortion; and homosexual marriage. All of these are contrary to Catholic teaching, and have turned a vocal and active group of conservative Catholics against him.
Kerry is so pro-death that one of his staffers tore a pro-life sign from the hands of a peaceful demonstrator and ripped it into pieces. On March 12th in Tampa, Florida, Rebecca Porter carried a sign that read simply, "My abortion hurt me." She wanted Kerry to see it so he would realize that abortion is more than a way to get elected. She wanted him to realize that real people feel real pain over abortion. But within seconds after Kerry read the words, a Kerry campaign staff member approached Porter and tore the sign from her hands. Kerry’s campaign has repeatedly refused to comment on the assault.
Kerry’s public statement on the controversy was “I fully intend to practice my religion separately from what I do with respect to my public life and that's the way it ought to be in America," he told reporters in Ohio this week. "There is a separation of Church and State in America and we have prided ourselves about that all of my lifetime, all of our history."
But Father Frank Pavone, director of Priests for Life, told Life News – www.LifeNews.com - that "Kerry proves by his own remarks that he is dangerously confused about three things: abortion, Catholicism, and 'separation of church and state.'
“If referring to his ‘public life,’ Kerry means supporting the dismemberment of babies, then not only is he separating his public life from religion, but also from basic human decency," Pavone said. "Regarding Catholicism, Kerry shows no understanding of the Church's teaching on the formation of a proper conscience," Pavone explained. "Regarding separation of Church and State, that has nothing to do with the state abandoning its responsibility to protect helpless human children."
Until he began his run for the presidency, Kerry never spoke of his religion. But his political advisors advised him that the great majority of Americans identify themselves as Christians, either Protestant or Catholic. Suddenly Kerry was in church every Sunday on the campaign trail. He even claimed that he “once thought of becoming a priest.” (That must have been when he was Irish, before the press discovered that was a lie and his ancestry was really French. I wonder if he planned to be a rabbi when he was Jewish?)
"People ask: 'Is he making up his beliefs to take the red states?'," asked Timothy Thibodeau, a history professor at Nazareth College in Rochester, N.Y. "Kerry's problem is that people doubt his sincerity. They think he is cooking up his religion just in time to run for the election."
John Kerry is a man without a conscience who represents a party that has lost its soul.
(Printer friendly version) Email: Tom Barrett
