Widening a growing rift, Rep. Patrick J. Kennedy, a Rhode Island Democrat, said on Sunday that the Roman Catholic bishop of Providence had instructed him to refrain from receiving communion because of the congressman’s stance on abortion. Rep. Kennedy said that Bishop Thomas J. Tobin “instructed me not to take communion and said that he has instructed the diocesan priests not to give me communion,” according to The Providence Journal, which first reported the article.
But Michael K Guilfoyle a spokesman for the diocese, said Sunday that the Bishop has “never addressed matters relative to public officials receiving Holy Communion with pastors of the Diocese of Providence.” The Bishop added that his instructions to Rep. Kennedy came more than two years ago in a letter on February 21, 2007, he sent to the congressman privately and pastorally.
“In light of the Church’s clear teaching, and your consistent actions,” the letter said, “I believe it is inappropriate for you to be receiving Holy Communion and I now ask respectfully that you refrain from doing so.” The Bishop added that he was surprised that Rep. Kennedy had chosen to reopen the public discussion of the faith just two weeks after he told reporters he would no longer discuss these matters publicly.
The allegation by Rep. Kennedy, a Democrat in his eighth term, is the most recent escalation in a bitter and unusually personal dispute between the men that began after the lawmaker criticized the nation’s Catholic bishops for threatening to oppose an overhaul of the health care system unless it tightened restrictions on publicly financed abortion…
… According to the National Catholic Reporter, Cardinal Sean O’Malley, the archbishop of Boston, once urged Catholic officials who support abortion rights to refrain from Communion. But the newspaper said Cardinal O’Malley did not order Boston priests to deny them the sacrament. Kerry and the late Massachusetts Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (Patrick Kennedy’s father and another supporter of abortion rights) both received Communion at Cardinal O’Malley’s installation as archbishop in 2003. In 2004, a large majority of bishops “tried to persuade the minority not to do this — using Communion as a weapon,” Father Reese said, but the conference could not come to a consensus view on the issue.
Orders by bishops to deny Communion to Catholic public officials are very unusual but not unprecedented. In 2003, another prominent Catholic Democrat with a mixed voting record on abortion, Rep. David Obey of Wisconsin, was admonished not to take Communion in his congressional district by Bishop Raymond Burke of LaCrosse. Spokeswoman McQuade said the bishops conference could not give a count of how many times bishops have actually denied Communion to government officials. But a review of news accounts of the past two decades suggests that public impositions of the penalty are very uncommon. These are among the high-profile instances in contemporaneous news stories: a Sacramento bishop told Gray Davis not to take Communion when he was Democratic governor of California in 2003; in 2004, then-Gov. James McGreevey, of New Jersey, complied with the admonitions of three of the state’s bishops that he not take Communion…
Father Reese stressed that withholding Communion is not as grave a penalty as excommunication, which separates a Catholic from all the sacraments. If a bishop denies Communion to a Catholic, he or she “is still a Catholic,” Father Reese said. Indeed, he said “it would take a canon lawyer” to say whether a Catholic denied Communion in his own diocese would be free to receive Communion elsewhere…
There make be a back story that explains all of this. Kennedy is an on-again off-again recovering alcoholic/drug addict and has had several high profile brushes with the law. Maybe Bishop Tobin is reacting to those stories. But perhaps Bishop Tobin is just another self-righteous religious leader who has an inflated view of his position in the church, and is bent on spreading Catholic Morality outside of his pulpit.
Population control is the top issue for the U.S. [and most other countries in the world]. It’s hard to imagine that Bishop Tobin can believe that caring for the people of the earth [and the earth itself] by limiting our numbers is grounds for expelling anyone from the Church. Is his loyalty to the God he believes created us, or to the idiosyncratic beliefs of the men of the Catholic Church?
I just read Kennedy Barred From Communion by Bishop in the New York Times. Then I went to your web site and read:
In his first encyclical as our Holy Father, Pope Benedict XVI, has written a very important and beautiful treatise called Deus Caritas Est, or God is Love. This encyclical focuses on God’s love for us and our responsibility as a Christian community to share that love with one another. The Pope writes, “Love of neighbor, grounded in love of God, is first and foremost a responsibility of each individual member of the faithful, but is also a responsibility of the entire Church at every level.” Through this letter we are reminded of God’s true love for us and are called to keep His redemptive work alive and active in our world.I am a retired Psychoanalyst and Psychiatrist. In my profession, I learned that my mind was never infallible and that there were more times than I liked where some personal glitch, some piece of my own psychological story, interfered with my mental clarity. Over the years, I learned lots of tricks to help me know when it was time to take a look inside, maybe even get some help from a colleague. When I read this story, particularly these quotes below, I found myself thinking that if were I Bishop Tobin, I’d take a very long walk and try to figure out my part in the absurd exchanges I was having with Representative Patrick Kennedy. I might even read Deus Caritas Est, or God is Love first, and then take that walk.
- In response, Bishop Tobin rebuked Mr. Kennedy, accusing him of “false advertising” for describing himself as a Catholic.
- ”If you freely choose to be a Catholic, it means you believe certain things, you do certain things,” Bishop Tobin said at the time.
- “If you cannot do all that in conscience, then you should perhaps feel free to go somewhere else.”
- “In light of the Church’s clear teaching, and your consistent actions,” the letter said, “I believe it is inappropriate for you to be receiving Holy Communion and I now ask respectfully that you refrain from doing so.”
They don’t sound like the words of a Bishop who is thinking right. I can assure you that any psychologically or spiritually informed person reading that article would likely reach the same conclusion. There’s more here than meets the eye and it doesn’t seem that you know it. Sorry to be so free with the unsolicited advice. I expect the person screening this email won’t pass it along, but on the odd chance that you see it, my motive in writing it is, in-so-far-as-I know-it, benevolent…
As someone who went to Catholic school taught by nuns and out of high school went into the convent for a short while and left on a leave of absence, I later got married and became a Eucharistic Minister for the church. I also went through instruction to become a Catholic Bereavement Counselor. As a Euchristic Minister one of my main duties was to give out communion (host) to parisheners at church or any other place when catholics couldn’t get to church (hospitals, care centers, nursing homes etc. I find it so repugnant that a Bishop or anyone else would make a judgement to punish a politician because he believes in a womans choice. I stopped giving out communion when the pope continued to insist that catholics around the world shouldn’t you protection while having sex, especially after the discovery of aids. The bishop is trying to stop people from voting for so called sinners Voters worried for years that voting for a catholic would be giving the pope power. Shame on them.The obvious thing their doing is telling catholics if you vote for Kennedy or others like him, and think like and vote like him, you could be denied communion too. That would be a frightening thing to do because catholics have been taught communion is a wonderful gift and gives you special graces etc. I’m sorry for the computer porblem with the words.
It seems a shame. Religion is about the “care of the soul” and a person’s relationship with ultimate causes. To trivialize it for some anachronistic social belief to the detriment of its practitioners just seems cruel…