|
Secular Politics and Roman Catholic Canon Law : |
|
In this 21st century ultra-Conservative Catholics in the United States have found a new tool to use against their more Liberal counterparts in the church. They have dusted off the Church's official rule book, the "Code of Canon Law", and because they see in Canon 915 a weapon that they can use in their war against abortion, they now proclaim that Code "divinely inspired" and playing on the current DaVinci Code craze, refer to it as "The Divinity Code".
In 2006, the Roman Catholic "American Life League" website http://www.all.org/article.php?id=10798 used full page ads in papers such as USA Today to urge the nation's bishops to serve the political advantage of the Republican Party by threatening Liberal Democratic candidates and/or incumbents with political (as well as spiritual) harm, if they don't stop taking seriously the oath of office they take to "uphold the Constitution of the United States" -- which includes the obligation to abide by the Supreme Court decision declaring that women in America have a constitutionally protected right, throughout the first trimester at least, to terminate any pregnancy of theirs. Here's a pictorial rendition of that ad (reduced to fit your computer screen):
 Father James Buckley, FSSP (an order established by Pope John Paul II, which likes things the way they were before the Second Vatican Council), has clarified why American Life League is asking the Church's bishops to enforce Canon 915: "Prior to Vatican II priests were more conscious that the obligation of preventing public sinners from receiving communion rested on them. Today they hesitate. Further, Canon Law 915 clearly prohibits public sinners from taking the Eucharist. Priests are not disciplining pro-abortion legislators when they enforce this Canon law; they are protecting the Eucharist from sacrilege."
St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, III:q 80: article 6 These same conservative Catholics might be more believable if they were not at this very moment promoting the canonization of Pope Pius XII and defending all of the Catholic bishops of Europe who, throughout the period of World War II, turned a deaf ear to all of the pleas of those who begged the Church to proclaim loud and clear that Catholics could not have any part in the effort being made by Adolf Hitler, a Roman Catholic in good standing with the church, to persecute and even exterminate the entire Jewish population of Europe. See http://JesusWouldBeFurious.Org/RCscandal which shows on the one hand how many of the leaders and the actual "executioners" of the Jewish holocaust were Roman Catholics in good standing, and on the other, how little use was made of the threat of excommunication or denial of the sacraments to dissuade either the Catholic leadership or the many millions of Catholics who carried out the actual brutalities against the Jews and others (including many Catholics victims) to divorce themselves from the holocaust, at the very least. As a young priest, the future Pius XII, who came from a family of Catholic Church lawyers, was one of a handful of clerics charged with the creation of the Catholic Church's entire "Code of Canon Law". Of those who pleaded for Pope Pius XII to demand that Catholics stop killing Jews by the millions, few if any may have known of Canon # 915, and specifically invoked it, but this pope was certainly familiar with it. ( and with Canon 1397 which states: �A person who commits a homicide or who kidnaps, detains, mutilates, or gravely wounds a person by force or fraud is to be punished with the privations and prohibitions mentioned in can. 1336.) Although Conservative Republican Catholics defend Pope Pius XII for not abiding by Canon 915, when it came to the crimes perpetrated by NAZI Catholics against Jews, they want to invoke this same Canon against all of these Liberal Democratic Catholic politicians in America in our time. |
| Democratic Members of Congress as of 2006 : | ||
|
|
|
|
 contact [email protected] This is just one of the many dimensions of  Click on this banner to see the whole picture! |