Vatican Official Bans Biden and Other Pro-Abort "Catholics" from Receiving Communion

Catholic politicians who defend abortion in the public sphere should not receive Communion "until they have reformed their lives", a leading Vatican official has said.

In an interview with the magazine Radici Christiane, the prefect of the Apostolic Signature, Archbishop Raymond Burke, said there was often a lack of reverence at Mass when receiving Communion.

"Receiving the Body and Blood of Christ unworthily is a sacrilege," he warned. "If it is done deliberately in mortal sin it is a sacrilege."

To illustrate his point, Archbishop Burke referred to "public officials who, with knowledge and consent, uphold actions that are against the Divine and Eternal moral law. For example, if they support abortion, which entails the taking of innocent and defenceless human lives."

The archbishop said that "a person who commits sin in this way should be publicly admonished in such a way as to not receive Communion until he or she has reformed his life."

He added: "If a person who has been admonished persists in public mortal sin and attempts to receive Communion, the minister of the Eucharist has the obligation to deny it to him. Why? Above all, for the salvation of that person, preventing him from committing a sacrilege.

"We must avoid giving people the impression that one can be in a state of mortal sin and receive the Eucharist.

"Secondly, there could be another form of scandal, consisting of leading people to think that the public act that this person is doing, which until now everyone believed was a serious sin, is really not that serious — if the Church allows him or her to receive Communion.

"If we have a public figure who is openly and deliberately upholding abortion rights and receiving the Eucharist, what will the average person think? He or she could come to believe that it up to a certain point it is OK to do away with an innocent life in the mother's womb," he warned.

Archbishop Burke also noted that when a bishop or a Church leader prevents an abortion supporter from receiving Communion it was "not with the intention of interfering in public life but rather in the spiritual state of the politician or public official who, if Catholic, should follow the divine law in the public sphere as well".

The archbishop said it was "simply ridiculous and wrong" to try to silence priests, "accusing them of interfering in politics so that he cannot do good to the soul of a member of his flock," he said.

The archbishop said it was also "simply wrong" to think that faith must be reduced to the private sphere and eliminated from public life. He encouraged Catholics "to bear witness to our faith not only in private in our homes but also in our public lives with others in order to bear strong witness to Christ".

Time for Biden Justice

Now that Biden has "punished" and banned a second TV station from future interviews for asking a few obvious and pointed questions, perhaps its time his bishop followed his example and declared this Catholic-in-name-only excommunicated and anathema.

Joe Biden's Bishop: He's Wrong on Catholic Church and Abortion Teaching

By Steven Ertelt

Joe Biden's own bishop has had to correct the pro-abortion vice-presidential candidate again on his misstating the pro-life teachings of the Catholic Church. In an interview last week, Biden claimed Catholics can support abortion and he understated the far-reaching effects of the Roe v. Wade decision.

In the interview with the Delaware News Journal, Biden continued to misrepresent the position of the Catholic Church on abortion in a way that has gotten him in trouble recently.

"But throughout the church's history, we've argued between whether or not it is wrong in every circumstance and the degree of wrong. Catholics have this notion, it's almost a gradation," Biden claimed.

Not so says Rev. W. Francis Malooly, the bishop of the Catholic Diocese of Wilmington.

He writes in a new letter to the editor that Biden "presents a seriously erroneous picture of Catholic teaching on abortion."

"This is simply incorrect," he says of Biden's interpretation. "The teaching of the Church is clear and not open to debate. Abortion is a grave sin because it is the wrongful taking of an innocent human life."

"The Church received the tradition opposing abortion from Judaism. In the Greco-Roman world, early Christians were identifiable by their rejection of the common practices of abortion and infanticide," Malooly goes on to say.

"The Didache, probably the earliest Christian writing apart from the New Testament, explicitly condemns abortion without exceptions," he continues. "This has been the consistent teaching of the Church ever since."

Malooly said there was some uncertainty in previous centuries about the beginning of human life but science has confirmed that human life begins at conception and the Catholic Church has never wavered in supporting that view and that human life deserves protection from that point.

"Of course, we now know that a fetus is a living human being from the very start. Thus, abortions take innocent human lives no matter when they occur," he says.

Malooly also condemns the trimester framework Biden uses to justify his support for Roe, which allows virtually unlimited abortions throughout pregnancy.

"Since there is no gradation in the Church’s teaching on abortion, there is no way the medically obsolete division of pregnancy into three trimesters by Roe v. Wade can have any bearing on the rightness or wrongness of abortion," the bishop explains. "Taking an innocent life in the womb is wrong at any stage of pregnancy."

Malooly calls on Biden to change his views on abortion and to conform to the pro-life teachings of the church.

He said all "statesmen and politicians" should be courageous and effective in their defense and promotion of the sanctity of human life."

"We hope Sen. Biden will carefully listen to the Church’s 2,000 years of testimony on abortion and that he will join in the defense and promotion of the sanctity of life," he concluded.

Barbara West Questions Biden: What Real Journalism Looks Like

Younger voters may think that Katie Couric asking Barack Obama when he last cried is what journalism is about, but the following offers a glimpse of real journalism as it was once practiced in America:

Did Biden Betray Soviet Jews?

From Catholics Against Joe Biden

In 1979, while Pope John Paul II was travelling to Poland, preaching a message of human rights and inherent human dignity, thereby giving hope to his oppressed people and spelling the beginning of the end of the scourge of Soviet communism, Sen. Joe Biden may have been, according to Soviet-era documents, busy undermining those efforts. Ed Morrissey reports:

According to internal Soviet Union documents from the SALT-2 negotiations in 1979, Joe Biden effectively told Soviet negotiators not to worry about American rhetoric about human-rights concerns. In fact, Biden also told the Soviets that the Senate didn’t really care about European security, but only in giving the appearance of caring about it. Vladimir Bukovsky and Pavel Stroilov parse the dispatch from the deputy head of the International Department of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union for Front Page Magazine ...

***
... Biden and Lugar may have wanted to clear the talks from all other considerations, which might make sense, except for the rhetoric of Biden and Carter on human rights and their criticism of previous administrations for ignoring the issue in past negotiations. Biden and other Democrats would make that same criticism through the Reagan administration, right up to the collapse of the USSR.

If Biden sold out the refuseniks while he and his party screeched about their plight, then he has already demonstrated a lack of resolve and character for higher office. Biden needs to explain himself.

[More]

The Joe Biden Gaffe Clock

So many people are enjoying the gaffe-a-day antics of Barack Obama's comedic sidekick, Joe Biden, the Republican National Committee has created "The Joe Biden Gaffe Clock." You'll want to check back often for laughs like this, this and this.

Supreme Knight's Letter to Biden

Dear Senator Biden:

I write to you today as a fellow Catholic layman, on a subject that has become a major topic of concern in this yearʼs presidential campaign.

The bishops who have taken public issue with your remarks on the Churchʼs historical position on abortion are far from alone. Senator Obama stressed your Catholic identity repeatedly when he introduced you as his running mate, and so your statements carry considerable weight, whether they are correct or not. You now have a unique responsibility when you make public statements about Catholic teaching.

On NBCʼsMeet the Press, you appealed to the 13th Century writings of St. Thomas Aquinas to cast doubt on the consistent teaching of the Catholic Church on abortion.

There are several problems with this.

First, Aquinas obviously had only a medieval understanding of biology, and thus could only speculate about how an unborn child develops in the womb. I doubt that there is any other area of public policy where you would appeal to a 13th Century knowledge of biology as the basis for modern law.

Second, Aquinasʼ theological view is in any case entirely consistent with the long history of Catholic Church teaching in this area, holding that abortion is a grave sin to be avoided at any time during pregnancy.

This teaching dates all the way back to the Didache, written in the second century. It is found in the writings of Tertullian, Jerome, Augustine and Aquinas, and was reaffirmed by the Second Vatican Council, which described abortion as "an unspeakable crime" and held that the right to life must be protected from the "moment of conception." This consistent teaching was restated most recently last month in the response of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops to remarks by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Statements that suggest that our Church has anything less than a consistent teaching on abortion are not merely incorrect; they may lead Catholic women facing crisis pregnancies to misunderstand the moral gravity of an abortion decision.

Neither should a discussion about a medieval understanding of the first few days or weeks of life be allowed to draw attention away from the remaining portion of an unborn child's life. In those months, even ancient and medieval doctors agreed that a child is developing in the womb.

And as you are well aware, Roe v. Wade allows for abortion at any point during a pregnancy. While you voted for the ban on partial birth abortions, your unconditional support for Roe is a de facto endorsement of permitting all other late term abortions, and thus calls into question your appeal to Aquinas.

I recognize that you struggle with your conscience on the issue, and have said that you accept the Churchʼs teaching that life begins at conception – as a matter of faith. But modern medical science leaves no doubt about the fact that each person's life begins at conception. It is not a matter of personal religious belief, but of science.

Finally, your unwillingness to bring your Catholic moral views into the public policy arena on this issue alone is troubling.

There were several remarkable ironies in your first appearance as Senator Obamaʼs running mate on the steps of the old state capitol in Springfield, Illinois.

His selection as the first black American to be the nominee of a major party for president of the United States owes an incalculable debt to two movements that were led by people whose religious convictions motivated them to confront the moral evils of their day – the abolitionist movement of the 19th Century, and the civil rights movement of the 20th Century.

Your rally in Springfield took place just a mile or so from the tomb of Abraham Lincoln, who in April 1859 wrote these words in a letter to Henry Pierce:

“This is a world of compensations; and he who would be no slave, must consent to have no slave. Those who deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves; and, under a just God, cannot long retain it.”

Lincoln fought slavery in the name of “a just God” without embarrassment or apology. He confronted an America in which black Americans were not considered “persons” under the law, and were thus not entitled to fundamental Constitutional rights. Today, children of all races who are fully viable and only minutes from being born are also denied recognition as “persons” because of the Roe v. Wade regime that you so strongly support. Lincolnʼs reasoning regarding slavery applies with equal force to children who are minutes, hours or days away from birth.

The American founders began our great national quest for liberty by declaring that we are all “created equal.” It took nearly a century to transform that bold statement into the letter of the law, and another century still to make it a reality. The founders believed that we are “endowed by [our] Creator with certain unalienable rights,” and that first among these is “life.”

You have a choice: you can listen to your conscience and work to secure the rights of the unborn to share in the fruits of our hard-won liberty, or you can choose to turn your back on them.

On behalf of the 1.28 million members of the Knights of Columbus and their families in the United States, I appeal to you, as a Catholic who acknowledges that life begins at conception, to resolve to protect this unalienable right. I would welcome the opportunity to discuss these issues personally with you in greater detail during the weeks between now and November 4.

Respectfully,

Carl A. Anderson
Supreme Knight

September 19, 2008

McCain Responds to Biden's "Be a Patriot, Pay More Taxes" Message

Joe Biden and American Charity -- What His Tax Returns Mean

Who needs charity when the plan is to give your money to their causes? In the following column Byron York looks at Joe Biden's tax returns and the approximately one eighth of one percent of adjusted gross income that the Senator has given to charity over the past ten years.

From National Review Online
By Byron York

It has become a common practice, when a presidential candidate releases his or her tax returns, for reporters and pundits to examine how much the candidate gave to charity. In September 1992, for example, when the Washington Post reported that Al Gore, then the Democratic candidate for vice president, had released his tax returns, the second paragraph in the story noted that out of income of $183,558, Gore “donated $1,727 — less than 1 percent — to charity.” Other stories about other candidates routinely included figures on charitable giving.

Last Friday, Sen. Joseph Biden, the Democratic candidate for vice president, released his tax returns for the years 1998 to 2007. The returns revealed that in one year, 1999, Biden and his wife Jill gave $120 to charity out of an adjusted gross income of $210,979. In 2005, out of an adjusted gross income of $321,379, the Bidens gave $380. In nine out of the ten years for which tax returns were released, the Bidens gave less than $400 to charity; in the tenth year, 2007, when Biden was running for president, they gave $995 out of an adjusted gross income of $319,853.

Here is a chart of the Bidens’ giving for the years covered by the tax returns:

Adjusted
Gross Income Charity

1998 $215,432 $195

1999 $210,797 $120

2000 $219,953 $360

2001 $220,712 $360

2002 $227,811 $260

2003 $231,375 $260

2004 $234,271 $380

2005 $321,379 $380

2006 $248,459 $380

2007 $319,853 $995

Total $2,450,042 $3,690

To take Biden’s worst year, 1999, one percent of his adjusted gross income would have been $2,100. One half of one percent would have been $1,050. One quarter of one percent would have been $525. One eighth of one percent would have been $262. And one sixteenth of one percent would have been $131 — still a bit more than the Bidens gave.

To take Biden’s best year, 2007, one percent of his adjusted gross income would have been $3,190. One half of one percent would have been $1,595. One quarter of one percent would have been $797 — a figure Biden surpassed by nearly $200.

Looking at the ten-year total of Biden’s giving, one percent would have been $24,500. One half of one percent would have been $12,250. One quarter of one percent would have been $6,125. And one eighth of one percent would have been $3,062 — just below what Biden actually contributed.

“The average American household gives about two percent of adjusted gross income,” says Arthur Brooks, the Syracuse University scholar, soon to take over as head of the American Enterprise Institute, who has done extensive research on American giving. “On average, [Biden] is not giving more than one tenth as much as the average American household, and that is evidence that he doesn’t share charitable values with the average American.”

A spokesman for Biden, David Wade, says the figures on Biden’s tax return do not reflect the true extent of his giving. “The charitable contributions claimed by the Bidens on their tax returns are not the sum of their annual contributions to charity,” Wade said in a statement to NRO. “Like most regular churchgoers, they contribute to their church, and they also contribute to their favorite causes with their time as well as their checkbooks, whether it’s [Jill] Biden’s volunteer work with military families or the Biden breast-health initiative, or the way in which the family pitched in driving supplies to the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina, or the ways Sen. Biden has supported charities that help women, police, and veterans.”

Wade also suggests that Biden, who is famous for being the least wealthy member of the U.S. Senate, simply doesn’t have piles of money to give. “Like a lot of families that put three kids through college and have an aging parent move in with them, the Bidens aren’t divorced from the realities of everyday life,” Wade says. Still, Wade continues, “finding ways to give back is important to them.”

So far, at least, Biden’s tax returns have attracted little attention. On Saturday, the Washington Post published a 468-word story on the subject, the main point of which was that the release of Biden’s returns was an effort by the Obama campaign to pressure the McCain campaign to release Sarah Palin’s returns. After a few brief paragraphs on Biden, the rest of the story concerned Palin, reporting that “progressive groups” are eager to find out whether Palin “skirted tax obligations” on the per diem payments she received from the Alaska state government. The story made no mention of Biden’s charitable giving.

But for people who have studied the impressive generosity of the American public, there is news in Biden’s returns. “I’m not going to say he’s a bad guy,” says Arthur Brooks. “My only point is that his values are not typical American values when it comes to charitable giving. Americans in general are very generous.”

Byron York, NR’s White House correspondent, is the author of the book The Vast Left Wing Conspiracy: The Untold Story of How Democratic Operatives, Eccentric Billionaires, Liberal Activists, and Assorted Celebrities Tried to Bring Down a President — and Why They’ll Try Even Harder Next Time.

Sarah Palin: An Innocent Abroad

From Chronicles
By Srdja Trifkovic

At Christmas a couple of years ago I was given a daily planner called The Worst Case Scenario Survival Calendar. It gives you advice on how to deal with seriously dire emergencies, like free-falling from 10,000 feet with a parachute that wouldn’t open, facing shark attack far from shore, being bitten by a cobra with no antidote on hand, or evading a roaring grizzly in the wilderness. The advice was tongue-in-cheek serious: based on real-life situations and special forces’ manuals, each daily snippet told you how to improve your chances of survival perhaps a hundredfold—from one-in-ten-thousand, say, to one-in-a-hundred. The booklet was fun: you don’t really believe that you’ll ever be in need of such advice, but you read on nevertheless, tickled with vivid images of horrors that happen to “others.”

The forthcoming general election is a Worst-Case Scenario Survival situation and it is happening to us. November 4 calls for the Guide approach. Let me come to the point and speak plainly.

When we look at this season’s four key names—Obama, McCain, Biden, Palin—we know what three of them signify.

Let us start with Senator Obama, that perpetually self-inventing Kenyan-Hawaiian nobody who came from who-knows-where. He may be an American citizen after all, but his disdain for the still-real and historic America is on full display even when it is wrapped in smilingly patronizing condescension for its majority population. The purpose of his presidency would be to re-educate that population in the spirit of self-loathing – his cult-like following among many white yuppies gives him great hope – and to neutralize the incorrigible segment by whatever means the postmodern therapeutic state has on offer. Abroad, we’d have the “Concert of Democracies” led by Washington deciding whom to bomb, with Zbigniew Brzezinski pulling the strings. Under Obama, America’s overall odds, at home and abroad, would be no better than those of a Dresden firefighter on February 13, 1945.

Joe Biden is the archetypical Homo Beltveicus. He’d be Pol Pot’s running mate if that served Joe Biden’s quest for power, money, and then some more of the same. He proves that in Washington we have the best Congress and the worst hair pluggers money can buy. An interventionist to boot, Biden enthusiastically supported Clinton’s bombing campaign against the Serbs in 1999, which prompted John McCain to declare three weeks into the war, “We need Joe Biden for secretary of state.” When Tim Russert asked, “Is that an offer by President McCain?” McCain replied: “Absolutely!” Almost a decade later he is on the same page with McCain on supporting Kosovo’s independence and in his visceral Russophobia, as evidenced by his recent trip to Tbilisi.

In case of a Democratic victory Biden’s chances of succeeding Obama would be no better than one-in-fifty, however – not that it would matter much one way or another. Barring a Dallas-like scenario that Hillary Clinton wished him in the primaries’ final days, Obama is good for another quarter-century of CV building and self-reinvention before finally making the Hajj.

John McCain is an unstable ignoramus who has never seen a war he wouldn’t gladly escalate. He is also obtuse, unendearingly eccentric, and morally challenged. (Let us not waste time dwelling on those traits; the evidence is ample and available to the curious.) If elected he would invent new missions and embark on new cakewalks, because he cannot do otherwise and because he’d be surrounded by foreign lobbyists (Scheunemann) and McCain clones (Lieberman) who reflect and support his mindset. He is an authentically dangerous man. His only saving grace, and the reason to vote for him under the Worst Scenario rules, is his age.

Mortality tables used by the life insurance industry and by the Social Security Administration indicate that average life expectancy for a 72-year-old man is at best about 11 years. That figure declines to about one half of that, however, when we factor in two significant variables: (1) four cancer scares, including melanoma (plus a long history of early and middle age smoking); and (2) a choleric personality (as per Hippocrates), which is dangerous when coupled with the pressures of a top office.

The probability of McCain dying before the end of the first term is a little over 20 percent before those variables are factored in, but they jump to somewhere between 33 and 40 percent when they are taken into consideration. Furthermore, the actuarial morbidity tables may significantly increase the odds of Veep Palin becoming President following the onset of an incapacitating condition that would force McCain to resign.

That leaves us with the probability of one-third or better that President Sarah Palin would be sworn in before the expiry of McCain’s first term. What would she do? I don’t know, but I am pretty certain that her foreign policies would not be any worse than those proposed by the three men. The Washingtonian “foreign policy community” would try to manipulate her, of course, but she is a tough nut to crack. Over the past few years she readily confronted an Old Boys’ Network and defeated Frank Murkowski, the sitting Republican governor, in the 2006 Republican gubernatorial primary. Before that she resigned a State sinecure, protesting the “lack of ethics” of fellow Republican members, and went on to destroy the political careers of Randy Ruedrich, GOP State Chairman, and Gregg Renkes, a former Alaska Attorney General.

Mrs. Palin’s alleged weaknesses are her strengths. Being an innocent abroad, in the dangerous world modelled on Hobbes and Darwin, is preferable to having “experience” in the obsessive attempt to tame and conquer that world. The Weekly Standard cabal and their ilk will be hard-pressed to make President Palin obey a bunch of Manhattanite intellectual pseuds, let alone to internalize their foreign policy schemes that are evil, stupid, and harmful to our troops’ safety: unlike any laptop bombardier, she has a son on his way to Iraq. I’d say that it is at least 50-50 President Palin would act as a foreign policy realist who’d refrain from new “missions,” “engagements” and “force projections.” That translates into cca 20 percent chance of America conducting a sane foreign policy, for the first time in decades, some time before 2012.

Most of our daily choices are morally ambiguous. The one based on The Worst Case Scenario Survival Calendar, which I am presenting herewith for our readers’ consideration, is no exception. In a fallen world the alternative is plague-on-all-their-houses quietism that suits the bad guys.

Now, Senator, Touch the Tip of Your Nose

We all knew it would only be a matter of time before Senator Biden said something really inappropriate, but who knew he'd do it three sheets to the wind? The media has been so focused on the private lives of Governor Palin's family, they completely overlooked a well fortified Biden shuffling and slurring in this public performance.

Obama, Biden and the Earmarks That Bind

The Washington Post reports today that "Senator Obama sought more than $3.4 million in congressional earmarks for clients of the lobbyist son of his Democratic running mate, Sen. Joseph R. Biden.

And we thought Obama was inexperienced in the ways of Washington!

According to The Washington Post, the younger Biden "has registered to represent about 21 clients that have brought in $3.5 million to his Washington firm, according to lobbying disclosure forms.

Dad works the system pretty well too. According to the Post, "Senator Biden has collected more than $6.9 million in campaign contributions from lobbyists and lawyers since 1989."