This is from a very conservative, pro-life web site and has some deep implications with regard to a religious organization that seeks political power.
By John-Henry Westen
WASHINGTON, November 19, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The possible signing of the Freedom of Choice Act (FOCA) by President-Elect Barack Obama would be “the equivalent of a war” an unnamed senior Vatican official recently told TIME magazine.
The startling comments make the second time this week that a Vatican official has forthrightly and in the strongest language condemned Obama’s extreme policies on abortion. Speaking at the Catholic University of America a few days ago, Vatican Cardinal James Stafford labeled Obama’s anti-life policies as “aggressive, disruptive, and apocalyptic,” also noting that, “On November 4, 2008, America suffered a cultural earthquake” (see coverage: http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2008/nov/08111703.html ).
With Catholic, but outspokenly pro-abortion individuals occupying two prominent positions (Joseph Biden as vice president and Tom Daschle as Health and Human Services Secretary) the specter of public excommunication or denial of communion for prominent members of the Obama Administration has arisen.
The focus of the Vatican’s concern, FOCA, is a bill that would do away with state laws on abortion, including laws mandating parental involvement, or banning partial birth abortion. FOCA would also compel taxpayer funding of abortions, and, of greatest concern to Bishops, would force faith-based hospitals and healthcare facilities to perform abortions.
Obama has in the past said that he would make signing FOCA one of the highest priorities of his presidency.
Last week at the meeting of US Bishops in Baltimore, Cybercast News Service asked Chicago Cardinal Francis George, the current president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, if voting for FOCA would bring a penalty of automatic excommunication for Catholic politicians. The Cardinal did not rule it out.
“The excommunication is automatic if that act is in fact formal cooperation, and that is precisely what would have to be discussed once you would see the terms of the act itself,” responded Cardinal George. When asked for more, he added: “The categories in moral theology about cooperating in evil, which make you complicit in the evil even though you don’t do it yourself, are material cooperation, which is usually remote and therefore doesn’t involve you in the moral action except in a very auxiliary and minor way, and formal cooperation, which would involve you even though you are not doing it, in the way that makes you culpable.
(Read the full article: http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/printerfriendly.html?articleid=08111908 )
Automatic excommunication? I can understand that Catholics are against abortion, but where in the Bible does it discuss this issue directly? It sounds like excommunication would be an act of exercising relgious power over other people rather than trying to convince someone to do what’s right. Threats have never worked in trying to get people to do what’s right in the eyes of others.
Automatic excommunication? I can understand that Catholics are against abortion, but where in the Bible does it discuss this issue directly? It sounds like excommunication would be an act of exercising relgious power over other people rather than trying to convince someone to do what’s right. Threats have never worked in trying to get people to do what’s right in the eyes of others.
Actually, most dominant world religions (along with Atheism) have been established through the use of both threats and violence. They are basically the tools of government enforced religion (previously known as “tyranny” by American founders). They work quite well, and are the sole reason Rome’s Catholicism is the largest Christian religious denomination on earth, and Islam the largest non-christian variety. Judaism, never enforced beyond the boarders of Israel, remains a paltry religious minority, even in it’s modern state sponsored Rabbinical version. In Utah, Mormonism established itself through the use of Massacres and political persecutions to become dominate in the Southwestern US. This historical fact of cruelty has misled many into the pursuit of Atheism, without realizing it too was an irrelevant minority view historically, until enforced through bloodshed and genocide in the former Soviet Union and Red China. Nobody knows this history more, and is more unapologetic about it’s own bloody contribution to it, (holding the record for bloodshed well into the modern era) than Rome’s Imperial Vatican. yes, it does work. Otherwise no one would be stupid enough to willfully believe half the religions on earth. A fact Atheism gets much undeserved mileage from, having made it’s own Vatican record breaking contrirutions.
Judaism, never enforced beyond the boarders of Israel, remains a paltry
religious minority, even in it’s modern state sponsored Rabbinical
version. In Utah, Mormonism established itself through the use of
Massacres and political persecutions to become dominate in the
Southwestern US.