State Sen. Raymond Lesniak, a veteran Democrat from Union County, said that he would follow his church’s wishes in New Jersey and that he would drive to New York City to receive Communion.
Lesniak, a former altar boy like many of his colleagues, is honorary chairman of this year’s Pulaski Day Parade in New York and has been invited to a ceremonial audience with Pope John Paul II at the Vatican this summer. Yet, he said, he cannot receive Communion in his home state.
“The archbishop of Newark has made it clear that our presence is unwelcome at the altar,” Lesniak said.
Kenny said that, at a meeting he arranged this weekend with his pastor, Msgr. Frank Del Prete, of SS. Peter and Paul Church in Hoboken, he asked whether he would be denied Communion because of his support for abortion rights and stem-cell research. Kenny said he was told he would be offered Communion one more time “but that then he would tell me not to come again.”
“I will look for other options to express my faith and will probably join another Christian church,” Kenny said.
“Under the church’s position,” he said, “the public could justifiably infer that the act of a public official taking Communion means they were following the directives of the church on policy issues.”
This is rather bizarre. I am not sure how a bishop’s re-statement of what it means to be a Catholic participating in Eucharist translates into marching orders for legislators. I am also not sure how driving to another diocese serves any function except self-serving ones.
Seems to me that this is the kind of article that first, could have used a voice from the Church responding to the gist of these comments and correcting them. But since we don’t have that, it’s a piece that really calls for the voices of Church teachers in response – taking each point of misunderstanding and misstatement and correcting them.
Lesniak said it was “unconscionable” for Newark Archbishop John J. Myers to condone violating the separation of church and state. The church, he said, “ought to be trying to bring people together, not separate them.”
I mean….if you start the conversation, you have a responsibility to continue it.
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