{"id":7526,"date":"2004-04-08T07:59:46","date_gmt":"2004-04-08T07:59:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2004\/04\/george_on_communion.html"},"modified":"2004-04-08T07:59:46","modified_gmt":"2004-04-08T07:59:46","slug":"george_on_communion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/04\/george_on_communion.html","title":{"rendered":"George on Communion"},"content":{"rendered":"

Says he wouldn’t refuse Communion<\/a><\/p>\n

\nAsked whether he would follow at least one other bishop who directed priests to deny Communion to politicians who back abortion rights, George said: “No, not at this point. No.” He made the comments at a downtown luncheon of the City Club of Chicago.<\/p>\n

“I don’t have a good answer” to how the church should react to politicians who hold positions contrary to church law, George said. “I’m loath to say we should take too many public positions on that at this point.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And on a related topic, at the same luncheon<\/a><\/p>\n

“The great scandal, to my mind, of the Democratic Party is that there’s no pro-life caucus,” George told the crowd at the luncheon where he was guest speaker.<\/p>\n

“A party that historically has been concerned about the weakest among us — why, most Catholics were Democrats historically — doesn’t permit any freedom of speech around the question of abortion.<\/p>\n

“One can say, as I have, that the Democratic Party has lost its soul,” he said, as the largely Democratic audience, which included Cook County Board President John Stroger, sat gaping back at him.<\/p>\n

Then, with the comic timing of a late-night talk-show host, the cardinal quickly added, “One could also argue that the Republican Party never had a soul,” as the audience erupted into belly laughs and applause.<\/p>\n

“That’s called equal opportunity,” George quipped. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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Says he wouldn’t refuse Communion Asked whether he would follow at least one other bishop who directed priests to deny Communion to politicians who back abortion rights, George said: “No, not at this point. No.” He made the comments at a downtown luncheon of the City Club of Chicago. “I don’t have a good answer”…<\/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-7526","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nGeorge on 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\/2004\/04\/george_on_communion.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"George on Communion - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Says he wouldn’t refuse Communion Asked whether he would follow at least one other bishop who directed priests to deny Communion to politicians who back abortion rights, George said: “No, not at this point. 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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\/7526","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=7526"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7526\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7526"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7526"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7526"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}