{"id":7259,"date":"2004-05-19T14:21:19","date_gmt":"2004-05-19T14:21:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2004\/05\/sigh_5.html"},"modified":"2004-05-19T14:21:19","modified_gmt":"2004-05-19T14:21:19","slug":"sigh_5","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/05\/sigh_5.html","title":{"rendered":"Sigh"},"content":{"rendered":"

Stupidity at MSNBC<\/a><\/p>\n

What are Catholics — and all Americans — to make of this increasing clerical activism in trying to shape their political decisions? The bad news is it shows that the Church — for centuries no stranger to abuse of power, muddled priorities, and interfering where it shouldn’t — seems to be at it again. The good news: Perhaps now the media will stop personalizing the matter vis-a-vis a Presidential candidate and be forced to frame the issue in its proper context: Where is the line that separates church and state?<\/p>\n

The Church has long sought to exert a level of influence over its members that, to me, has involved demands and restrictions that have precious little to do with the teachings of Christ. I’m not alone, either. Millions of Catholics face the same choice. Bad enough that the Church wants to dictate what its people do in their bedrooms — now it wants to tell them what to do in the voting booth? On Apr. 23, the Vatican issued guidelines for the giving and receiving of Communion. Among the reasons a priest can choose not to give a person Communion: If the Communicant is not “rightly disposed.” <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The freakin’ nerve. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Stupidity at MSNBC What are Catholics — and all Americans — to make of this increasing clerical activism in trying to shape their political decisions? The bad news is it shows that the Church — for centuries no stranger to abuse of power, muddled priorities, and interfering where it shouldn’t — seems to be at…<\/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-7259","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nSigh - 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\/2004\/05\/sigh_5.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Sigh - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Stupidity at MSNBC What are Catholics — and all Americans — to make of this increasing clerical activism in trying to shape their political decisions? 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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\/7259","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=7259"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7259\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7259"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7259"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7259"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}