Oh dear O'Brien

Sat, 02 Jun 2007 14:19:37 +0200

Before he became a cardinal, Keith O'Brien was not a bad guy, as far as Catholic prelates go. But as so often, once these people start wearing their red hats, all powers of reasoning leave their poor brains.

And so Cardinal O'Brien has jumped on the bandwagon of bishops who believe that they have the personal right to decide whose "sins" are bad enough to disqualify them from receiving the Holy Eucharist. Like some of his colleagues in the USA (but not Cardinal McCarrick, who has worn the red head without sustaining brain damage), O'Brien has suggested that Catholic politicians who vote for pro choice legislation be banned from receiving Holy Communion.

Cardinal Ratzinger in 2004 virtually acknowledged that voting for abortion legislation does not in itself constitute material co-operation, and warned that this threat was very dicey. But he also left the issue of whether to withhold Communion from such politician to the local ordinary, to be decided on an individual basis.

So Ratzinger left the door open for men like O'Brien to bully politicians into abandoning their conscience (thereby kicking the theology thereof in the arse) and toe the line on a Catholic that is not a deposit if the faith. And the weapon is the Eucharist!

Think about it: The body and blood of Jesus is being used as a weapon to force potentially good men and women to violate the primacy of their conscience. Should that not offend every Catholic to the deepest core of their faith in the institution of the episcopate?

If, at least, these idiots who follow this wicked path were consistent in their unbridled enthusiasm for the Right to Life. But they are not. In the Catholic Church of John Paul II, we are taught to care more for the aborted embryo than we are for the murdered infant, the martyred activist, the fallen soldier, the executed criminal. Or the mother who dies because the Catholic Church said she cannot abort the child that is killing her.

Keith O'Brien, where was your big mouth when the mass murdering General Pinochet received Communion every day? Caput and Rigali, where are your uncompromising threats against judges and governors who pass down and confirm death penalties? And Pope Benedict, why don't you tell these morons that they are wrong to bully elected officials, wrong to be selective in their pro life activities, wrong to abuse the Eucharist as a weapon. What would Jesus Christ think of these hypocrites?

It's all very well to go all hooplah over unborn babies and, if you really have to, embryonic stem cells. But if you want to be militantly pro life, you have to apply that militancy across the board.

Or does life end with birth?

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Confessions of an Angry Cathholic

Oh dear O'Brien