EMINENTOES: Kerry Catholicism
Neumayr, George
ATHOLICISM POSES A MORE SERIOUS and ironic political problem for John F. Kerry than it did for the first JFK. Kennedy merely faced suspicion from non-Catholics, whereas Kerry faces / outright...
...Boston Archbishop Sean O'Malley could use this provision to ban Kerry from communion...
...Should that come to pass, it won't be Kerry's first encounter with canon law...
...But Kerry called it required reading for all Americans...
...Speaking on the Senate floor Kerry justified the bill on the grounds that "civil rights for gay people already gained substantial support" from religious groups...
...He feels it is not helpful at this time," the Boston priest said...
...The bishops' pastoral letter is an important document which should be read by Catholics and non-Catholics alike," he said...
...It's part of the right's attitude about Aristide...
...He had canon lawyers annul his first marriage...
...Louis Archbishop Raymond Burke told reporters last year that he would withhold communion from Kerry given the Massachusetts senator's libertine voting record...
...In the 1980s, Kerry, for example, once dumped into the Congressional Record large chunks of the U.S...
...Besides, said the source, "Kerry hasn't made an issue out of his Catholicism...
...But I think that it's important to not have the Church instructing politicians...
...The Congressional Record does yield one memorable pro-abortion speech from his early years as a senator...
...He lauded a court decision which concluded that "inmates not only have the constitutional right to an abortion for medical reasons, but that abortions must be paid for by the Government...
...After Aristide went into exile in February of this year, Kerry bitterly accused the Bush administration of "a theological and ideological hatred" toward Aristide...
...In a 1994 op-ed in the New York Times, Kerry called Aristide "Father Aristide" repeatedly, even though Aristide had been cashiered from the Salesian order several years earlier after the Vatican grew weary of his preaching in favor of Marxist violence...
...It goes back to the liberation theology that hepreached earlier in his career," Kerry said...
...He joked that "75 percent of all the annulments in the world take place in the United States, and I guess the figure drops to 50 percent if you take out all Massachusetts politicians...
...But O'Malley hasn't banned Kerry from communion, though canon law clearly obligates bishops to withhold sacraments from Catholic public figures who flout Church teaching—a point lay Catholic groups are pressing on O'Malley...
...Actually, Kerry has...
...So much for the "line" Kerry scolded Pope John Paul II for crossing last year when the pontiff issued a document calling on Catholic politicians to oppose abortion and homosexual marriage...
...Had Kerry, normally a loose post-Vatican II Catholic, ever called a priest "father" so enthusiastically before...
...Moreover, he has already demonstrated his willingness to compromise, agreeing to share power with a broad-based coalition with safeguards for everyone's rights...
...Religious organizations such as the National Council of Churches, the Lutheran Church in America, the United Church of Christ, the Episcopal Church USA, the United Presbyterian Church, the Union of American Hebrew Congregations and the National Federation of Priests' Councils among others, have taken positions in support of the inclusion of the term 'sexual orientation' in existing civil rights laws," he said...
...In a sign of Catholic controversies to come for Kerry, St...
...Kerry called him "Father Aristide" in an attempt to win U.S...
...Legislating on the basis of liberalized religion does not offend Kerry's scruples...
...Annulment, he told reporters, was "one of those special Catholic things...
...military might...
...On Ash Wednesday Kerry emerged from a Catholic church in Ohio with ash on his head as photographers covering the primaries snapped their cameras...
...If, say, abortion is discussed, his faith is suddenly a private matter...
...In 1986 he stood up to defend the right of federal prisoners to abort their unborn children...
...While orthodox Catholicism hasn't shaped his public actions, renegade Catholicism certainly has...
...On issues from welfare to the fate of defrocked priest Jean-Bertrand Aristide, however, Kerry's faith becomes very public again...
...But as for Drinan and Aristide, Kerry urged them to get into it...
...In the 1970s Kerry marched with radical feminists for the Equal Rights Amendment...
...George Neumayr is managing editor of The American Spectator...
...But it is not "appropriate in the United States for a legislator to legislate personal religious beliefs for the rest of the country...
...11 \TEN IF THE ORNAMENTS of traPditional religion can buttress ..4 a political need of the moment, Kerry isn't afraid to use them...
...His first wife Julia Thorne wasn't amused...
...Kerry usually says that priests should stay out of politics...
...sympathy for the brutal strongman...
...I believe in the Church and care about it enormously," Kerry said, disregarding the Pope's document...
...Kerry's apologetics for Aristide stemmed from Catholic sympathies for his "liberation theology...
...Liberated women freed from their children fit into Kerry's "liberation theology" too...
...Father Aristide may not be perfect (what elected leader is...
...Kerry is a graduate of the Jesuit Boston College law school, which explains in part Kerry's weakness for "liberation theology," a movement (popular with liberalized religious orders like the Jesuits) to turn Catholicism into Communism under the guise of the Gospels...
...Kerry relies on the private/public talking point Mario Cuomo made famous...
...Kennedy merely faced suspicion from non-Catholics, whereas Kerry faces / outright resistance from fellow Catholics...
...Provision 1369 of Catholic canon law states that a Catholic "is to be punished with a just penalty, who, at a public event or assembly, or in a published writing, or by otherwise using the means of social communication, utters blasphemy, or gravely harms public morals...
...bishops' pastoral letter on the economy...
...She said the annulment of her 14-year marriage to Kerry was "devoid of any sense of the humanity of what this means to me and the children...
...Father Aristide" was a known inciter of "necklacing," the practice of throwing gasoline-soaked tires around opponents' heads...
...In sum, this ruling clearly points out the fact that by denying Federal dollars for women in Federal prisons who choose to have abortions we are blatantly denying medical services...
...According to press reports, Kerry, early in his political career, passed up a congressional seat out of deference to Robert Drinan, the Jesuit congressman who voted consistently in favor of abortion...
...Go to the third line of the biography on his campaign website (johnkerry.corn), and you will read, "John Kerry was raised in the Catholic faith and continues to be an active member of the Catholic Church...
...APRIL 2004 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 33...
...That is an inappropriate crossing of the line in America...
...They rightly deplore Kerry's use of Catholicism as a campaign prop even as he contradicts its teachings...
...Take his bizarre shilling for Aristide, an ex-Salesian priest...
...Kerry used to boast that his maiden speech as a senator was a ringing endorsement of Roe...
...President Kennedy drew that line very clearly in 1960, and I believe we need to stand up for that line today...
...To win elections and advance liberalism Kerry isn't reluctant to cross that "line" himself...
...One of Kerry's first acts as a senator in the 1980s was to sponsor the federal Gay & Lesbian Civil Rights Bill...
...Kerry was trying to pass off a thug as a benign priest...
...The letter was an absurd quasi-socialist broadside against Reaganomics...
...Aristide was such a trendy cause in the Massachusetts dissenting-Catholic circles in which Kerry travels that the thug delivered a wedding reading at Joseph Kennedy's 1993 nuptials, according to the Boston Globe...
...Boston Archbishop Sean O'Malley agrees with Burke in principle, says a Boston archdiocesan source to TAS...
...but we have never discarded whole democracies because of an individual leader," Kerry wrote...
...Kerry's habit is to turn his Catholicism on and off according to political need...
...v. Wade (until reporters discovered that it wasn't...
...In 1994, Kerry made it his business to restore the ousted priest to power in Haiti through U.S...
...What I believe personally as a Catholic as an article of faith is an article of faith," Kerry has said...
Vol. 37 • April 2004 • No. 3
