Let’s Admit It: The Anti-Catholics Are Right!
David Carlin, a reasonable fellow, raises the question of whether our bishops should “excommunicate Catholic elected officials who consistently support pro-choice (pro-abortion) positions” (Our Sunday Visitor, Sept. 17). He sees it as a question “worthy of debate.”
Carlin is concerned that if Catholic pro-abortion politicians aren’t excommunicated, the question arises whether “the Catholic Church in America stands for Catholicism.” But! On the other hand, Carlin sees “weighty” reasons for not excommunicating them, and so he says “I’m still far from being convinced [that] excommunication…is a good idea….” His reasons:
(1) “It wouldn’t deter the politicians in question.”
(2) Those politicians would garner popularity by claiming that “they are being persecuted for ‘voting their conscience’ and for refusing to be dictated to by Rome and its episcopal minions.”
(3) Excommunication would resurrect the old anti-Catholic accusations that “Catholics are incapable of intellectual independence,” and that “a good Catholic cannot be a good American, since his or her first loyalty is to a ‘foreign prince’ [the Pope]….”
You May Also Enjoy
When we resist the demands of militant Islam, we are met not with pluralist-themed discussions or congenial tolerance but violence.
Most parents simply have no idea of what the schools have proposed, developed, and in many cases adopted under deceptive and innocuous sounding titles.
A central theme of his thought, which made him anathema to ideologues Left and Right, was that cultural libertarianism and economic libertinism go hand-in-hand.