The Catholic church as a whole is a strong anti-DP lobby. But as I say below->
Its also not really “the Church” going after Daschle. Its more or less one group of bishops, who apparently are more or less irritated about him. People do stupid things once in a while, and this parson has a lot of power (relatively so). It looks like he has a personal grudge against Daschle over this issue.
Bandit:
Exaclty. This thing has “politics” written all over it.
smiling bandit put it more succintly than I – this smells of a specific feud between Bishop Carlson and Senator Daschle. And of course the Church will say it wants all its members to make policy consistent with Church doctrine (little point in proclaiming it as doctrine otherwise)… but OTOH you don’t have an international institution last 1700 years by refusing to face political reality.
oh, and BTW, it’s: h-i-p-o-c-r-i-s-y – just needed to vent that peeve of mine, I keep running into “hipocracy” or “hipocricy” and it drives me to distraction…
Gaudere’s law, dude, Gaudere’s law. It’s h-y-p-o-c-r-i-s-y.
I have a question about the authority on which Carlson’s actions rests. The relevant part of the quote seems to be,
“A well-formed Christian conscience does not permit one to vote for a political program or an individual law which contradicts the fundamental contents of faith and morals.”
First, must one have a “well-formed Christian conscience” to call oneself a Catholic?
Second, has the Vatican established that voting for the legality of abortions “contradicts the fundamental contents of faith and morals”?
If either of these two questions are answered in the negative, then Carlson is blowing incense out his ass.
Daniel
Just for the record, even “a full blown excommunication” doesn’t make you “not a Catholic” – it makes you “a Catholic who is an unrepentant sinner and in consequence is not entitled to the sacraments of the church until you repent.”
Catholicism never throws anybody out – they just make their lives difficult if they’re a problem.
Makes one wonder, though, why they didn’t do this sort of insistence on legislative behavior having to conform to dogma back in the Middle Ages or in Nazi Germany, the latter of which Pius XII treated with kid gloves, apparently in an effort to ameliorate the worst problems by putting up with the others.
:smack: :o 
In my understanding, you are a Catholic if you have received the sacrament of Baptism and you have not formally or informally converted to another religion.
Even an excommunicated Catholic is a Catholic.
The voting for the abortion business is also rife with shades of gray. I don’t think there is much question that procuring or performing an abortion is a sinful act. But what if I, as a legislator, sought to reduce the number of abortions in the land - surely a good goal - by proposing and voting for compromise legislation that forbid any abortions after the first month of pregnancy, just to pick an example. On one hand, I’d argue that this is a pro-life move; it unquestionably restricts the number of abortions that could be performed. On the other hand, it equally clearly is legislation that permits abortions.
Where would such hypothetical legislation lie?
For this reason, I think the reconciliation between public acts and sinfulness should be done, as with all other things, by a personal and private examination of one’s conscience, and frequent reception of the Sacrament of Penance. I am extraordinarily uncomfortable with a bishop’s public declaration that a person may not call himself Catholic based on his legislative actions. If the bishop were calling him a bad Catholic, or a Catholic that’s barred from the sacraments for living in open scandal and defiance… that’s one thing. But the man is still a Catholic, and the issues under discussion are best dealt with between him and his confessor.
Didn’t you just answer your own question?
I have no problem with the message sent to Daschle, but agree the Church should be consistent. I have always found the stance (à la Kennedy) that one can personally embrace the Church’s teachings on abortion while not believing that this should be public policy disingenuous at best. If one understands and accepts the Church’s teachings on abortion (I understand there are many who do not), then there’s no real way to allow for opposition to it, any more than one could say “I’m against murder–but, hey, you can decide for yourself.”
Again, I understand there are many who do not accept this teaching, and these people are in no way hypocritical in espousing abortion rights (they are merely misguided ;)). “Catholics” who try to straddle the line are trying to have their cake and eat it too. If Daschle has faith in his convictions, he should welcome this rejection. I’m glad he’s out, anyway.
Bob, would you applaud the same sorts of expulsions for all Catholic legislators who support the death penalty, which the church teaches is also a horrible sin against God and humankind?
The Church also condemned the recent war on Iraq. Should all of the Congressfolk who supported that be booted, too?
I am far from an expert on Church teachings, but it’s my impression that there are aspects of the Church’s teachings that are dogma and those that are not, the latter being more “opinion,” if I may use that word. The Church teaches that only “just” wars should be fought. In the opinion of our Pope, the Iraq war was not a just war, but this teaching does not carry the weight (nor is it intended to) that established doctrine does.
The Church does not teach what you think it does regarding the death penalty. The Church does not teach that the DP is inherently wrong, only when it is unfairly applied (as in the U.S., an opinion I share).
Abortion, on the other hand, has no gray area or room for opinion in the Church’s teachings. Does this make sense?
Anyone more learned than I in RCC teachings like to clarify (or dispel my ignorance)?
The Church’s condemnation goes farther than you think. The Church says that the death penalty is justified only in situations that are so rare as to be “practically nonexistent.”* And the pope has said on multiple occassions that no modern Western state has the need to seek redress through the death penalty.
Therefore, while the church may allow the death penalty in less-well formed cultures, the pope and the Church have given no ground on their position that it is not necessary in the Western world. So to support it in America is to support that which the Church says in contradiction with Church teachings. Ergo, the Church should expel those who support the death penalty.
Count me as another pro life Catholic who views this action by the bishop with a rather dubious eye. It puts Carlson in the same boat with Fabian Bruskewitz and his excommunication zeal.
And that’s still not the same as teaching that the death penalty is a horrible sin against God and humanity.
But if the Church does teach that there is no room for opinion on the death penalty, then, yes, I’d agree, one who demonstrates a naked and unrepentant support for the DP ought to be brought to task…
Oops! Dave snuck a post in there. I was responding to spectrum…
“Sin against God and humanity” was a bit of rhetoric on my part. Any sin is against God and humanity, as all sin has a dual nature, rupturing both one’s relationship with God and one’s relationship with the Church, thus harming the Church as a whole. And since the Church is the vehicle of salvation, there’s your harm to humanity.
Anyway, my point was not to start an argument over the sinfulness of supporting the death penalty, but to bring up the Church’s inconsistency, which I believe lies in the fact that it is, once again, retreating from the concept of loyal dissent and the primacy of one’s own properly developed Christian conscience.
The modern Church has shied away from issuing “our way or the highway” statements on moral positions, instead allowing a great deal of reflection, even contention, on such issues by noted Catholic scholars, many of them clergy. The Church has proffered the idea that the Christian’s highest duty is towards the demands of their own conscience in regards to issues of morality, not merely blind obedience to a Vatican position, so far as that conscience has been properly informed by Church position, prayer and a grounding in Church tradition and Scripture.
This has created a mileu of moral consideration that has been of great value to the Church, IMO. While the Church’s official stances remain party line, it has allowed many of its theologians great leeway in considering and debating the true moral necessities of issues such as the death penalty, homosexuality, birth control, divorce and even abortion. The Church has not altered its positions on these issues in substansive ways in reaction to these considerations, and one should not expect it to, but it has allowed such freedom of conscience.
But as the current pontiff has grown older, this trend has abated. Freedom of conscience has been pressured on a myriad range of issues, and the Church appears to not only have made up its mind on, in particular, abortion (which is not to say the Church shouldn’t hae a position), but it will also no longer brook discussion or consideration of the topic by its lessers.
I see this action against Daschle as being couched in that sort of mindset. It’s as if the Church has decided, in contrary to its previous stance, that the only properly formed Christian conscience is that which agrees, in totality, down the line, with its positions. That strikes at the heart of the freedom of conscience. And to strike at that is to harm the Church in perpetuity, for a Church where discussion, and perhaps even a bit of dissent, is not allowed in the cosideration of matters moral is one that will almost inevitably slide down the slope into the sort of mindset that pollutes other religious bodies such as the Southern Baptist Convention.
It’s what one would expect from a backward fundamentalist Protestant body, not one of the branches of Christianity that has a particularly bright recent history as being amongst the most intellectual, rich and open to discourse.
Can Daschle negate the abortion issue if he comes out in support of child molestation? Seems to me that would make him even-steven with the Catholic Church.
Why is this disingenuous? Hypothetically speaking, Kennedy (or the politician of your choice) could personally oppose abortion but vote for more permissive legislation because he felt that it represented the wishes of his core constituency, which is his job. It does not necessarily constitute a personal endorsement. In practice this is pretty unlikely, but it highlights a key problem with the Church jumping on politicians for their voting records.
It is not the job of elected representatives to merely be a mouthpiece for the majority opinion of their constituency. However, it is also not a Catholic legislator’s job to push legislation that agress with Vatican teaching. Just as they are not a proxy vote for majority opinion in their district, they’re also not merely a legislative apparatus for the Congregation for the Doctrines of the Faith.
Poor Daschle. If instead of defending the freedom of women to control their own bodies, he had stuck to something the Catholic hierarchy approves of, like molesting children, he wouldn’t be in this mess.
And the anti-Catholics with only one poorly-made drum to bang crawl out of the woodwork in order to add absolutely nothing substantive to the debate.