Showdown in Steel City
In interviews, McCarrick and Neuhaus gave differing assessments of a proposal by Bishop Donald Wuerl of the Catholic Diocese of Pittsburgh regarding the public differences some bishops had in 2004 over whether to deny communion to Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry. Wuerl called for all U.S. bishops to consult with each other before taking public stands on the Catholic status of national political figures who support abortion rights.
Wuerl's proposal "is right on target," said McCarrick, who shares Wuerl's view that Catholic legislators who support abortion rights should not ask to receive communion, but that the priest should not refuse it if they do come forward, on the chance that they might have had a conversion. McCarrick expected Wuerl's proposal to receive significant discussion among the bishops.
Neuhaus praised the dozen or so bishops who would not allow Kerry to receive communion, but said that is not the only way to handle the problem.
"The bishop has to show in each and every case that he is in a very serious posture of pastoral care and concern for that politician -- and that has to be seen by the Catholic people. When something is a public scandal, it has to be remedied publicly, but there are many different ways in which bishops might exercise that pastoral care and concern," Neuhaus said.
As one speaker here is a bishop and the other most certainly isn't, the episcopal statement gets more credence because of the authority on which it rests.
Catholic groups, on both the left and the right, that claim to speak for the church but distort its teaching are not helpful, McCarrick said. He urged Catholics to study official church documents, rather than only interpretations in the media and by advocacy groups.
Amen.
In reply to a question from the audience about priests who made it sound as if it were a sin to vote for Kerry in 2004, [McCarrick] said that the Vatican clearly stated that it was acceptable to vote for a candidate who happened to support abortion, as long as that wasn't the reason for casting the vote.I can hear the distortions of this statement a-comin'....
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posted by Rocco Palmo at 10:43
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Neuhaus, a former Lutheran who was active in the civil rights movement, cited Martin Luther King. "Dr. King used to say, 'Whom you would change, you must first love, and they must know that you love them.' In these great contentions in the public square ... that is how we ought to be perceived, we Christians and Catholic Christians," Neuhaus said.
"Today you get Michael Moore on one side and Ann Coulter on the other. You see an unleashing of partisan rage and ridicule, and dehumanizing of the opposition."
Excellent comments from Neuhaus. The culture and religious war taking place in the United States has, as a Catholic social conservative once put it, sucked all of the oxygen out of the room. The fact that one cannot discuss a nice movie about penguins without getting into culture war battles and pointing fingers is clear demonstration to me that there is a cancer eating away at the United States. There are times that I feel like a Spanish liberal democrat at the outset of the Spanish Civil War who both the nationalist authoritarians and the communist want to shoot. Count me out of the culture wars.
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