Go Patrick!
Tobin, pain in the but that he is, has no business telling an ELECTED offical what to do. Kennedy represents the folks who voted for him, not the Catholic church, and he has been elected several times. Guess those voters aren’t unhappy with him.( I voted for him).
Kennedy has shown that the mighty Tobe isn’t as all powerful as he would like to think he is. Tobe isn’t elected by anyone…he had to kiss his way to the top in the business that is the church.
As a Rhode Islander, I’m proud of Patrick taking a stand and not being intimadated by Tobe.

Isn’t whether a person takes communion or not up to the person and their conscience? Not up to the priest of bishop, IMO. Tobin has no idea what is in Kennedy’s mind…

Tobin was out of line to mention anything personal about Patrick Kennedy, telling the world he at one time had a substance abuse, and he is acting eratic. Because he doesn’t agree with the RC stance on abortion, etc. does not make him eratic, but it does make the Priest seem over authoratative and a gossip. If Edward Kennedy were still alive and in Congress I don’t think Tobin would be so out there.

Their simmering dispute escalated in October when Kennedy criticized Catholic bishops for threatening to oppose an overhaul of the nation’s health care system unless lawmakers included tighter restrictions on abortion, which have since been added to the House version of the bill. Tobin said he felt Kennedy made an unprovoked attack on the church and demanded an apology.

Unprovoked! How can it be unprovoked when this church is trying to install a foreign religion over us all? I’d say it’s highly provoked.

Abortion is a major concern for Catholic bishops because opposition to the procedure is based on the church’s earliest teachings on preserving human life, which have not changedThat is just false. The RCC has been all too successful at sweeping under the rug the changes in Catholic dicta on when human live begins. And of course the press doesn’t do its homework.
Cuomo made a very astute observation in 1984. Too bad the Big Guys are so power mad they didn’t listen.

Ok I can only seem to do so much html and then it starts slipping away. My second set of comments start with “That is just false.” and go on.

I don’t believe Bshp Tobin made note of Kennedy’s substance abuse treatment.  That’s something the author threw in to make it look as though Tobin was kicking Kennedy while he was down.  Regarding Church teaching, several orthodox theologians of the first three or four centuries AD condemned abortion, even going so far as equating it with murder.  This isn’t something that recently sprung up 150 years ago as the CUA link contends.

Insofar as a person claims to be a Catholic (or member of any other religious body), then those entrusted with their religious care most definitely DO have a responsibility to give them instruction in the faith, pagansister. A person doesn’t somehow get to flout the faith and morals of their religious community just because they take a public office. And since when does following one’s moral convictions (which, for a Catholic, should be shaped by one’s life in the Body of the Christ) somehow amount to forsaking one’s responsibilities to one’s constituents, anyway? Since when does not supporting abortion mean that one is no longer doing one’s job as a politician? Your position simply doesn’t even make sense.
A religious politician should bring their religious background into their political decision-making, be they Catholic, evangelical, Jewish, Muslim, Marxist materialist, or whatever. If the voters don’t like that, they won’t vote a person in. Abandoning the moral teachings of your religion in order to please voters isn’t some noble act of representing your constituents better, since the voters are the ones who decide if they want you to represent them in the first place. There’s no law that says a Catholic politician in a liberal area has to abandon the Church’s pro-life position so they can please the voters and get elected. That’s their own personal, spiritual decision to make, and if they make it, then it is most definitely the responsibility of the rest of their religious community to hold them accountable for the decision they make.

H22 I don’t understand, is it just because he is a Kennedy that his substance abuse issues should not be discussed?

Well Nate we’ve heard that from you a few times before. And there might be something to it, except that the RCC is teaching millions of children and others a year that if they are not in it, they will spend eternity in hell.
So while some folks are smart enough to see through that clearly a lot are not and for them it would be mighty traumatic to just walk away from the RCC. So if there’s any fairness in the world, and I choose to think there is, they need to be able to be themselves while being in the RCC or the RCC needs to admit to the world it’s not them or Hell. Think they’ll do that?
But you do make a really good case for not belonging to any religious body.
Tom their point is that there have been lots of different papal and saintal opinions about when life begins. It has not always been the same like the RCC claims.

First of all, nnmns, the Catholic Church doesn’t teach that those who aren’t a part of it will spend an eternity in hell–some rogue priests might be teaching that, but that contradicts the official position of the Vatican, which upholds the possibility of salvation even for those outside the visible Church. And I’m not sure what it would matter if they were teaching that, anyway; just teaching the doctrine of hell doesn’t somehow make the Church guilty of political manipulation. The same point still stands: a Catholic politician (or any other religious politician) takes the moral teachings of their religion into the public square, and if the voters don’t like it, they won’t cast their votes in that direction. Besides, if a politician like Kennedy really believes that they’d better stay in the Church or risk burning in hell (which I doubt is the case with most of these liberal Catholic politicians), then why don’t they believe the rest of Catholic teaching, like the idea that Catholics aren’t supposed to be personally implicated in any way in abortions? But that’s beside the point; the fact of the matter remains that there’s nothing threatening to good politics about having a religious politician be open about their religion’s moral framework even in the public realm. Like I said, not supporting abortion does not in any way amount to not being a representative of one’s constituents, whether one believes in hell or not.

You are trying to have it both ways, Nate. As does the RCC. I’m guessing a lot of priests teach hell or at least let the hell idea go unchallenged. And how likely is this “salvation” for those outside the Church vs. those inside? What do you know about what’s taught in Catholic religious ed classes around the country and the world? Maybe not a lot more than I know. But if they were uniformly not teaching “RCC or hell” it would be a major reversal of what was taught not very long ago. A miraculous reversal, given people’s unwillingness to change what they were brought up with.
And where that is taught, the Church is creating some slaves. The poor folks who buy into it and really believe what folks like you say, that they have to think what they are told, are political slaves to whatever the Pope and his underlings decide is good for the Church, and themselves.
Which really does bring up Cuomo’s point: why would anyone vote for a Catholic who has not declared his or her freedom from intellectual slavery to these foreigners in the Vatican?

Nate presumably you have a research library there and know how to use it. See if you can find one or more general directives to priests that they should announce in church that folks needn’t be RC’s to get to heaven. Or that they should be sure their RE people never suggest membership in the RCC is required for heaven.
Tom, if you are here, you attend a Catholic church. What are you told about that there? Anyone else?

Todays news on CNN tells of P. Kennedy in therapy for his problems including depression. It’s good that Patrick wants us all to know that once you have these physical problems you must stay on top of them and that many have the same and shouldn’t be convicted of some terrible problem. The RC should not have started their harangue about his official job as Congressman and how he votes for the people of the U.S. that he vowed to uphold; all people, not just Roman Catholics. Some of the Clergy in the RC Church have become quite radical and extreme in their pushiness and should step back and take a deep breath.

Quite frankly, I don’t remember the last time (if ever) one of our parish priests preached on the concept of hell.  I do remember an FSSP priest preaching about it at a Tridentine Mass several months ago, but they’re vastly more conservative than the average, run-of-the-mill contemporary Catholic parish.
From Ad-Gentes (Vatican II doc):
…Therefore those men cannot be saved, who though aware that God, through Jesus Christ founded the Church as something necessary, still do not wish to enter into it, or to persevere in it.”(17) Therefore though God in ways known to Himself can lead those inculpably ignorant of the Gospel to find that faith without which it is impossible to please Him (Heb. 11:6), yet a necessity lies upon the Church (1 Cor. 9:16), and at the same time a sacred duty, to preach the Gospel. And hence missionary activity today as always retains its power and necessity.
From the Baltimore Catechism (revised 1941):
168. How can persons who are not members of the Catholic Church be saved?
Persons who are not members of the Catholic Church can be saved if, through no fault of their own, they do not know that the Catholic Church is the true Church, but they love God and try to do His will, for in this way they are connected with the Church by desire.
To my knowledge, the Catholic Church has never taught that those outside of Her are unequivocally damned.  The only ones I’m aware of that do are sedevacantists who contend that they’re the One True Church, that Vatican II was a heretical council and that we haven’t had a true standing Pope since Pius XII.

Thanks Tom.

That does make it sound like a Catholic who leaves might be considered to “know that the Catholic Church is the true Church” and thus be damned. What do you think?

I would hope that most who leave the Church (or any church) do so because they believe it is the right thing to do. People leave for a variety of reasons. Some had negative experiences with pastors, other parishioners, etc. Some were just born into Catholic families but never studied up on the faith and just went through the motions of being Catholic. Others may have suffered calamity and had difficulty reconciling the concept of a loving God allowing it (understandable). I wouldn’t make any blanket assertions concerning people who leave, nor do I believe the Magesterium does either. Many end up coming back before it’s all said and done.

nnmns, I’m a bit confused about what this has to do with the topic, really. The issue here is the Catholic faith and politics. I strongly doubt that someone like Kennedy is staying in the Catholic Church because of a belief that he’s doomed to hell if he leaves it, so it’s not all clear to me how having him stay faithful to the church’s teaching on abortion would amount to a case of the Catholics using the doctrine of hell to gain political power. I just don’t see how the whole hell thing is connecting here.

I hope and kind of expect you are right about Kennedy, but of course there are hundreds of thousands or millions of voters who are not so sophisticated, and whose votes the bishops are likely to be able to sway.

So…?

So that’s a bad thing for democracy and for the USA.

Hasn’t been a bad thing for democracy so far.

I think that IS democracy, nnmns. Even Aristotle recognized that real-world democracy is about demagogues fighting for control over the masses. Most voters simply do not have the time or the knowledge to really know what’s best for the country, and most of us are largely “controlled” by what we hear from other people. If it’s not certain Catholics holding the fear of religious condemnation over their parishioners’ heads then its the union leaders warning the laborers that voting Republican is anti-American or the women’s groups sending the message that you can’t be a true feminist and also be pro-life, or whatever. For better or for worse, that’s what democracy is and basically always has been, and there’s probably not a whole lot that anyone will ever be able to do to change that.

Let’s hope not. It’s everybody being different that swings ideas to the center and agreement in the end. Each disagreement overlaps the one suceeding.