{"id":1407,"date":"2007-06-18T00:15:02","date_gmt":"2007-06-18T00:15:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2007\/06\/giuliani-abortion-and-communion.html"},"modified":"2007-06-18T00:15:02","modified_gmt":"2007-06-18T00:15:02","slug":"giuliani-abortion-and-communion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/06\/giuliani-abortion-and-communion.html","title":{"rendered":"Giuliani, abortion and Communion"},"content":{"rendered":"

The NYObserver takes a good look:<\/a><\/p>\n

(And by "good" I mean objective and fair. No kidding.)<\/p>\n

\n
\n

Rudy Giuliani has made it clear that he doesn\u2019t \u201cget into debates with the pope.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Roman Catholic Church, however, is already debating what to do with the likes of Mr. Giuliani.<\/p>\n

Pope Benedict XVI and the bishops who run the Catholic Church have a longstanding practice of not directly commenting on the political candidates of any single country. But when presented with Mr. Giuliani\u2019s position on abortion, American Cardinal Edmund Casimir Szoka, the president emeritus of the governatorate of Vatican City State, was clear.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s not very acceptable to us,\u201d said Cardinal Szoka in a phone interview with The<\/em> Observer<\/em>. \u201cBecause if he says, \u2018Well, I\u2019m personally opposed but I believe a woman should have a right to choose,\u2019 well then, how can you be personally opposed? It\u2019s a contradiction.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cardinal Walter Kasper, president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity and a top Vatican official who is generally considered to have a more liberal outlook, also said in a separate interview that a Catholic politician holding positions like those of Mr. Giuliani\u2014the former Mayor says that he is morally opposed to abortion but supports abortion rights\u2014created a \u201ccontradiction.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cTo be pro-choice is directly against the fundamental Catholic position, and I don\u2019t see how it could be possible,\u201d said Cardinal Kasper, who is a member of the Roman Curia, the body that enforces the pope\u2019s policies, shapes the doctrine and runs the government of the Holy See. <\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s complicated,\u201d he said. \u201cQuestions of conscience are always complicated. But if somebody wants to be in public life, as a Catholic, he should also state Catholic positions.\u201d <\/p>\n

snip<\/em><\/p>\n

No matter what conclusion is reached, another question\u2014of equal political significance\u2014is how the church should apply its decision to Catholic elected officials who share Mr. Giuliani\u2019s views. Cardinal Kasper, for example, laughed at the prospect of summarily excommunicating pro-choice Catholic politicians, a policy that would lead to the canonical expulsion of most elected officials in the traditionally Catholic countries of Western Europe.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t want to excommunicate all types of people,\u201d he said. \u201cBut it\u2019s a serious thing. The church has to take serious its own positions. It cannot be without consequence when a Catholic publicly departs from these positions. The church has to take serious its own position.\u201d<\/p>\n

That matter will soon come to a head once again in a highly visible debate with consequences for the candidacy of Mr. Giuliani, who is seeking the nomination of a party that has voted in every Presidential election in the past three decades for openly religious Christians. In November, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops will finalize its position on political responsibility for Catholic politicians. And for the first time, the proceedings will be discussed in open session and opened up to the floor, so that any of the roughly 400 bishops can weigh in or propose an amendment to the conference\u2019s statement.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The NYObserver takes a good look: (And by "good" I mean objective and fair. No kidding.) Rudy Giuliani has made it clear that he doesn\u2019t \u201cget into debates with the pope.\u201d The Roman Catholic Church, however, is already debating what to do with the likes of Mr. Giuliani. Pope Benedict XVI and the bishops who…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1407","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nGiuliani, abortion and Communion - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/06\/giuliani-abortion-and-communion.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Giuliani, abortion and Communion - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The NYObserver takes a good look: (And by "good" I mean objective and fair. No kidding.) Rudy Giuliani has made it clear that he doesn\u2019t \u201cget into debates with the pope.\u201d The Roman Catholic Church, however, is already debating what to do with the likes of Mr. Giuliani. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1407","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1407"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1407\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1407"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1407"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1407"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}