{"id":2842,"date":"2007-02-25T10:10:55","date_gmt":"2007-02-25T10:10:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2007\/02\/communion-in-nj-contd.html"},"modified":"2007-02-25T10:10:55","modified_gmt":"2007-02-25T10:10:55","slug":"communion-in-nj-contd","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/02\/communion-in-nj-contd.html","title":{"rendered":"Communion in NJ, cont’d"},"content":{"rendered":"

At Mirror of Justice, <\/a>Patrick Brennan of Villanova<\/a> comments on John Allen’s interview with Archbishop Myers of Newark:<\/a><\/p>\n

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Little wonder, I suppose, that politicians wishing to abuse and injure the visible communion of the Church have pretty much a green light in New Jersey.  The clergy have effectively put the laity in charge of communion, the laity (we’re told) don’t know what’s going on, and the politicans — who we can be sure do know what’s going on when they claim to have a right to receive communion while causing a scandal to the faithful by there persisent, public disregard of a central, nonnegotiable Church teaching — are without benefit of Church leadership that will teach them that they are putting themselves outside the visible communion of the Church.  Pastoral prudence is called for, to be sure — and it does not include saying in a news interview that the Church cannot protect the sacramental communion because she has turned it over to benighted laity.  <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Here is what seems, to me, to be true: When we look back at the history of Christianity, the moments when the Church fails to embody a powerful witness to the Gospel are always those moments in time, in which the Church aligns itself with secular power, or, at the very least, refuses to speak the Truth in the midst of a complicated relationship with secular power.  Yes, hindsight is 20\/20, conveniently so, but still, there are lessons that can be learned. And, you would think, should be. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At Mirror of Justice, Patrick Brennan of Villanova comments on John Allen’s interview with Archbishop Myers of Newark: Little wonder, I suppose, that politicians wishing to abuse and injure the visible communion of the Church have pretty much a green light in New Jersey.  The clergy have effectively put the laity in charge of communion,…<\/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-2842","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nCommunion in NJ, cont'd - 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\/02\/communion-in-nj-contd.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Communion in NJ, cont'd - 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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\/2842","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=2842"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2842\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2842"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2842"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2842"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}