The Boston Globe's James Carroll is trying hard to inspire "general outrage" and thereby help Senator Kerry by falsely telling his readers, especially his Catholic readers, that Republicans are misrepresenting Senator Kerry and attacking "Kerry's religion."
Those readers should be outraged with Carroll and Kerry, especially Catholic readers.
Carroll, a nominal Catholic who rejects absolute truths, shamelessly assured his readers that Kerry is a devoted Catholic, based upon having "observed the senator at prayer" over years; impugned a sound challenge to Kerry's "religious integrity" (while baselessly denouncing President Bush's religious integrity); sacrilegiously charged Kerry critics with "profaning...all that is sacred"; falsely claimed that Vatican II recognized "the primacy of conscience" over fundamental Church teaching, and ludicrously lauded the gravely sinful "public positions advanced by John Kerry" for reflecting a "spirit of openness."
The truth is that John Kerry is shamelessly posing for political purposes as a practicing Catholic in a state of grace and full communion with the Roman Catholic Church, Kerry's critics are NOT criticizing the principles of the Roman Catholic Church that Kerry is disregarding, and Carroll is doing precisely what he charged Kerry's critics with doing: "lying about the meaning of Catholic faith...and moving the political exploitation of religion to a new low."
Carroll is the one who "twisted" what he claimed to be his own religion for political purposes.
Carroll is the liar, not the Republican National Committee.
The Republican National Committee is right to call attention to what Carroll unintendedly called "Kerry's religious unworthiness as a Catholic."
The Republican National Committee is right to "label" John Kerry as "wrong for Catholics."
Truth-in-advertising principles call for it.
John Kerry IS a heretic.
Marc A. Balestrieri has filed a denunciation to have Kerry's Boston Archdiocese officially declare that fact.
If Canon Law is faithfully followed instead of ignored, it will be declared.
John Kerry is still pathetically promising women the "right" to kill their unborn babies for any reason or no reason.
Even though last July he shocked his own spokesperson by professing to believe that life begins at conception (since Marc Balestrieri had denounced him as a heretic and that did not bode well for his presidential campaign).
Like a faithful Catholic, John Kerry asserts personal opposition to abortion.
BUT, John Kerry assures abortion supporters that they can have all the abortions they want.
At the dinner hosted by NARAL Pro-Choice America (formerly, the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League) to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Supreme Court's decisions in Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton, John Kerry passionately proclaimed, "We are not going to turn back the clock. There is no overturning of Roe v. Wade. There is no packing of courts with judges who will be hostile to choice."
John Kerry’s excuse for supposedly opposing abortion personally but legislating in favor of it: “I can't take my Catholic belief, my article of faith, and legislate it on a Protestant or a Jew or an atheist. We have separation of church and state in the United States of America."
The truth is that John Kerry has categorically and consistently rejected the Roman Catholic Church’s teaching on the relationship between natural law and civil law in order to win the support of pro-abortion and pro-“gay marriage” voters.
That is John Kerry’s political right as an American.
But it is well established as gravely sinful for a Roman Catholic.
As Pope John Paul II wrote in Evangelium Vitae:
“The doctrine on the necessary conformity of civil law with the moral law is in continuity with the whole tradition of the Church. This is clear once more from John XXIII's Encyclical: ‘Authority is a postulate of the moral order and derives from God. Consequently, laws and decrees enacted in contravention of the moral order, and hence of the divine will, can have no binding force in conscience...; indeed, the passing of such laws undermines the very nature of authority and results in shameful abuse’. This is the clear teaching of Saint Thomas Aquinas, who writes that ‘human law is law inasmuch as it is in conformity with right reason and thus derives from the eternal law. But when a law is contrary to reason, it is called an unjust law; but in this case it ceases to be a law and becomes instead an act of violence’. And again: ‘Every law made by man can be called a law insofar as it derives from the natural law. But if it is somehow opposed to the natural law, then it is not really a law but rather a corruption of the law’.”
Pope John Paul II explained that “the first and most immediate application of this teaching concerns a human law which disregards the fundamental right and source of all other rights which is the right to life, a right belonging to every individual.”
As the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith stated in its Doctrinal Note on Some Questions Regarding the Participation of Catholics in Political Life: “[T]he lay Catholic's duty to be morally coherent…is one and indivisible. There cannot be two parallel lives…: on the one hand, the so-called 'spiritual life', with its values and demands; and on the other, the so-called 'secular' life, that is, life in a family, at work, in social responsibilities, in the responsibilities of public life and in culture.”
The Doctrinal Note continued: “It is not the Church’s task to set forth specific political solutions – and even less to propose a single solution as the acceptable one – to temporal questions that God has left to the free and responsible judgment of each person. It is, however, the Church’s right and duty to provide a moral judgment on temporal matters when this is required by faith or the moral law.” (Emphasis added.)
The Doctrinal Note emphasized that Catholic politicians “directly involved in lawmaking bodies have a ‘grave and clear obligation to oppose’ any law that attacks human life. For them, as for every Catholic, it is impossible to promote such laws or to vote for them.” (Emphasis added.)
John Kerry may hate it, but a faithful Catholic politician may not compromise on fundamental matters. “When political activity comes up against moral principles that do not admit of exception, compromise or derogation, the Catholic commitment becomes more evident and laden with responsibility. In the face of fundamental and inalienable ethical demands, Christians must recognize that what is at stake is the essence of the moral law, which concerns the integral good of the human person. This is the case with laws concerning abortion and euthanasia (not to be confused with the decision to forgo extraordinary treatments, which is morally legitimate). Such laws must defend the basic right to life from conception to natural death.”
Amen!
---
Email: GaynorMike@aol.com
NOTE: HERE'S THE REFERENCE TO THE CARROLL OP-ED:
www.boston.com:80/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped
/articles/2004/09/28/playing_politics_with_religion
