In 1960, JFK made a presidential candidate member of the RCC (Roman Catholic Church) electable because he said he would NOT take his marching orders from the Pope, but from the Constitution of the United States of America. Now, a group of American bishops is seeking to make a nonCatholic United States President take his marching orders from the Pope, as well as attempting to force RCC members of the US Congress and many state houses to do the same.
Are the American bishops seeking to take us back to the 1920s when a Catholic WAS unelectable as US president?
ead more below the fold:
Let's review a few things that have happened in just the past week or so.
First, the Pope went to Africa, where over 25 million people, men and women, have died of AIDS, leaving millions of children motherless and fatherless, and said that, against all rational thought, that condoms are not the answer, or even an answer to the AIDS problem. That condoms ARE the problem.
Of course, we know that while condoms are NOT the entire answer to the AIDS epidemic in Africa or anywhere else, we also know that the use of condoms every time is one of the few strategies that is known to reduce the incidence of AIDS in sexually active women in Africa or anywhere else.
And now the American RCC bishops are opposing Obama's appearance at the University of Notre Dame, an institution where every American President since Dwight Eisenhower has spoken in the last 50 years, is being opposed by a small group of radical American Catholics, when most of the world's people, including Catholics, vehemently disagree with the Pope's and church's teachings on birth control, abortion, stem cell research and several other reproductive issues.
And a few weeks ago, in Brazil, the RCC hierarchy has excommunicated several doctors and the young girl's mother for requesting and doing an abortion on a 9 year old girl pregnant with twins! No mention of excommunicating the girls stepfather who had been raping this girl and her sister for years.
This morning a colleague reminded me of the story of a women in another country who refused to return for an abortion after having several water absorbing instruments called laminaria inserted into her cervix to make it easier and safer to do a midterm abortion. She decided to let "God make the decision." The physician who had inserted the laminaria asked her to return to allow him to remove the laminaria. She refused, even though he informed her that there could be very serious consequences if the laminaria remained. She replied that she would trust in God to take care of her. After reading the Bible many times as an adolescent and grown up, it became very obvious to me that God hated women almost as much as the heirarchy of the RCC! If one is to believe the stories told of him in the New Testiment, God Jr, called Jesus by some, was born of a woman and grew up in a household with several step-brothers and -sisters, with an absentee father, was more considerate of woman and girls than his big daddy, God Sr.
As far as I am concerned, the lose of members and revenue couldn't
to happen to a worse group of people than to the RCC hierarchy over the past 40 plus years. The Popes (and their appointees) that have been selected since John XXIII and his very short lived successor - whom some felt was murdered - have been about as bad as any popes that ever "served" the Church. (Well, maybe not as bad as the Borgias.) In other words, a pretty sorry lot.
I know and respect a whole bunch of Catholics. None of them are serving the RCC anymore, or even attending the church's activities. Good for them.