Meddling
The US Conference of Catholic Bishops trying to rule us all again:
The Roman Catholic bishops of the United States, flouting a warning from the Vatican, have overwhelmingly voted to draft a statement on the sacrament of the Eucharist, advancing a political push by conservative bishops to deny President Biden communion because of his support of abortion rights.
They’re bishops. They’re not senators or representatives or part of the executive branch, they’re bishops – clergy of one particular religious sect. They’re not the boss of us. They’re not the boss of Biden either.
The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, an assembly of the country’s 433 active and retired bishops, can issue guideline statements, but it does not have the authority to decide who can or cannot receive the sacrament of communion. That power is reserved for the local bishop, who has autonomy in his diocese, or the Pope.
But it’s theater. Look at us, we’re god’s janitors.
Yes, they are trying to rule us all.
I am decidedly of two minds on this, though. They are trying to deny a religious rite to a member of their religion for reasons of doctrine.
If a person were denied rites in a pacifist church for doing their job as an executioner or soldier, killing people, I might be mildly supportive. It’s not demanding the person give up the job, it’s imposing intra-religion consequences for doing the job. Those consequences might be onerous. Maybe the person is influenced to quit, or maybe the person is influenced to leave the damn religion.
Similarly here, the USCCB is advising an intra-religion consequence for liberal politicians for doing a job. The job is politics, and this does in some sense constitute meddling in politics, but it is different from directly advocating policy, or things like pushing for Catholic hospitals to get special privileges (wait, they already have those).
I would love for the Catholic Church to become inhospitable for decent people, and for decent people to leave the damn religion; maybe these consequences can prod people to do so.
Are we back to antipopes again? Because I’m pretty sure American bishops can’t just arbitrarily decide that what he says doesn’t matter.
So they’re also recommending that politicians who support the death penalty — and especially those governors who decline to commute death sentences? Right? I mean, they’re being consistent in demanding that the Catholic position on the sanctity of life be obeyed?
Oh. I see.
Things like this remind me of how some Christians tried to justify their religion’s teachings on homosexuality by saying “oh sure, my church teaches that gay people are sinners. But it teaches that we’re ALL sinners, so no big deal!” Yeah, but you take some of those things more seriously than others, and that gives the game away.
Screechy:
All women of the faith should bring their used tampons etc to church, and preferably to these bishops, so that they can be given the last rites, just in case they contain a single fertilised ovum with its own immortal soul contained within its single cell membrane.
There is surely a hope of a chance of a possibility that such might just sort the pontificating bastards out.
I am unclear. Do pedophile priests get communion?
Naif: Though it is a bit of a stretch of my theological qualifications, I would guess that A would be Father Confessor to B, and B would be Father Confessor to A. Known more widely as “you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.” That would help also in the formation of pedophile rings, such as the one that flourished in Ballarat, Victoria, Australia. For years. And also included Fr Gerry Ridsdale, who shared a house there for a time with the illustrious Cardinal Pell, now the thid most senior in the global Catholic hierarchy, who himself was found guilty of pedophilia by the Victorian Supreme Court, but won an appeal to the High Court.
https://theconversation.com/au/topics/george-pell-2831
This was, actually, an objection from some of the more, well, let’s just say liberal members for the sake of argument.
They said it is not consistent to carve out this one issue while leaving the others alone.
I was talking to my daughter at dinner last night, and we discussed how I am not only not Catholic any more as an atheist. I am in fact very anti-Catholic because of they way they ignore the logs in their own eyes and wail about the motes in everyone else’s eyes. You know, the Magdalene Laundries, the Residential Schools, the hostiliy to lesbians and gays, the insistence on marriage as a sacred institution while they abuse children and let it slide.
Then we discussed Sinead O’Connor and now I have “The Emperor’s New Clothes” as an earworm.