Patrick Kennedy barred from communion
Rhode Island Bishop Thomas Tobin has barred Congressman Patrick Kennedy from receiving communion, apparently in reprisal for his criticism of the church’s activism regarding abortion in the health care bill.
Rep. Patrick J. Kennedy, A Rhode Island Democrat, said the Roman Catholic bishop of Providence has forbidden him from receiving communion due to his support for abortion rights, the Providence Journal reported on its Web site Sunday.
Kennedy said Providence Bishop Thomas J. Tobin “instructed me not to take communion and said that he has instructed the diocesan priests not to give me communion,” the paper reported.
Well … ho-hum. It is their club and they can do whatever they like.
But make no mistake: This is exactly the same as the theocratic expectation of the Islamic states, where the very idea of church and state separation is baffling.
Meantime, in the secular West, clerical avarice for control is getting its deserved comeuppance.
HUNTER-based Catholics are shunning Mass in droves, with irrelevance, abuse at the hands of clergy and disagreement with the Church’s teachings on sex among the main reasons. According to research carried out by the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference, only 10.2 per cent of Catholics in the Diocese of Maitland-Newcastle attend Mass. The national average for Mass attendance across the Church’s 28 Australian diocese was 13.8 per cent.
All that is needed to complete the circle is the realization that the abuse scandals, and all the other human misery that follows around Holy Men, is not the work of individual aberrants but the inevitable consequence of the teachings.
