Pope's Biographer: Kerry Distorting Catholic Doctrine
Friday, Apr. 16, 2004
Senator John Kerry is deliberately misrepresenting the doctrine of the Catholic Church to which he claims to be a faithful member. says author George Weigel.
Weigel is a prominent Roman Catholic theologian and one of America's leading commentators on issues of religion and public life.
He is the acclaimed biographer of Pope John Paul II and a Senior Fellow at Washington's Ethics and Public Policy Center where he is the director of the Catholic Studies program.
In an exclusive interview with NewsMax.com, Weigel said the real issue facing America's Catholic bishops is not the question of banning Kerry from receiving Communion, but the Democratic presidential candidate's willful distortion of Church teaching on abortion and his responsibility to follow Catholic doctrine.
"The most important issue at this point is for the bishops as a group to make clear that Senator Kerry is systematically misrepresenting the nature of Catholic teaching on the life issues. The question of his reception of the sacraments, however is something that belongs properly to his local bishop, Archbishop Sean O'Malley of Boston.
"What belongs to everyone, since this is a national candidacy, is the responsibility to make clear that when Kerry says the Church's pro-life teaching is a sectarian position which cannot be imposed on a pluralistic society, he is willfully misrepresenting the nature of the Church's position -- by suggesting that this is something analogous to the Catholic Church trying to force everyone in the United States to abstain from eating hot dogs on Fridays during Lent."
"This is simply false," Weigel told NewsMax.com. "The Church's pro-life teaching is something that can be engaged seriously by anyone. You don't have to believe that there are seven sacraments to deal with this, you don't have to believe in the primacy of the bishop of Rome to engage this position. You don't even have to believe in God to engage this [pro-Life] position because it's a position rooted in basic embryology and in basic logic, and anybody can engage that."
What, then, should the Catholic Church do about its errant communicant?
"The most important thing for the bishops of the United States to do is to make very clear that Kerry is misrepresenting the nature of the Church's pro-life position," Weigel said, adding, "What happens beyond that ... is a matter for him and Archbishop O'Malley."
In his latest column in the Denver Catholic Register, Weigel wrote that this year's presidential election will have enormous historical consequences.
The abortion debate, where Kerry is stridently pro-abortion, the struggle to define moral and legal boundaries for the development of biotechnology, and the question of a Federal Marriage Amendment, are all expressions of this more fundamental division over the nature of freedom, Weigel wrote.
"If the argument for freedom as personal willfulness ("my way") prevails, it seems likely that abortion will remain unrestricted, the biotech industry virtually unregulated, and 'marriage' will mean, eventually, any configuration of (perhaps any number of) consenting adults," he wrote.
If on the other hand "the argument prevails that freedom means freely choosing what we can know to be morally good, there may be a real chance to accelerate the building of a culture of life in America."
Phil Brennan, NewsMax.com |
