Pro-life protesters plan to stage a demonstration this evening in Poughkeepsie to call on Cardinal Edward Egan to deny U.S. Rep. John Hall the Catholic sacrament of the Eucharist because Hall supports abortion rights.
Hall, a Democrat from Dover Plains, took office in January. The protesters said his positions on abortion violate Roman Catholic law, but their message is for Egan.
"If you're pro-choice, you cannot be Catholic," protest organizer Helen Westover said. "It is up to Cardinal Egan to forbid publicly. It is his job. It is the job of all the bishops of the country."
A few bishops have taken that step in recent years to single out some Catholic members of Congress for their permissive stances on abortion. The question of a pro-choice politician's fitness to receive Communion also became an issue in the 2004 presidential campaign of U.S. Sen. John Kerry, a Democrat from Massachusetts who is Catholic.
Egan hasn't made it a public issue in the Archdiocese of New York.
"If there were an issue with a congressperson or anybody else for that matter ... that would be addressed privately and not publicly," archdiocese spokesman Joseph Zwilling said. He was unaware of plans for the demonstration.
The event is scheduled for 5 p.m. in front of the Archdiocesan Catholic Center on Church Street in Poughkeepsie. Westover said it would last about an hour and include a handful of people, many of them participants in the weekly pro-life protests Westover leads in front of Planned Parenthood on Noxon Street in Poughkeepsie
source.
I've never heard of Catholics staging a protest demanding that a bishop deny communion to a pro-abort Catholic legislator. I wonder what the Pope and the leading cardinals at the Vatican would think of this.
The Catholic faithful are groaning for leadership from the bishops on this matter. We know the Catholic pro-abort politicians vote against life. What is stopping the bishops from doing the morally correct thing?
I know what it is, to a degree. It's the fear of having the Church's tax-exempt status revoked. It's the fear of rocking the boat. It's the fear of alienating left-leaning priests, volunteers and church-goers.
Fod God's sakes, will the bishops please stand up for the TRUTH?
I think we pro-lifers should also change our language with respect to Catholic pro-abort politicians.
Saying a politician "supports abortion" actually sounds too legitamite. Abortion has become such a bland word, compared to enormity of its evil.
I think we Catholics should be castigating politicians for being against the equality of unborn children, and spreading fetophobia.
Because isn't that really what's holding back the pro-life movement? The widespread fetophobia about the unborn child-- the belief he's a clump of cells, that he's not worthy of love, that he's not a member of the family, and so forth?
It doesn't sound like the Archdiocese really cares about these protesters. Isn't that typical: Catholic central is filled with modernist liberals who think they're above that sort of thing.
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