Sophoan Sorn

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A South Carolina Roman Catholic priest has released a letter to parishioners advising those who voted for President-elect Barack Obama to refrain from receiving communion, the AP/Yahoo! News reports. The letter by the Rev. Jay Scott Newman of St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Greenville, S.C., states that supporting a “pro-abortion politician when a plausible pro-life alternative exists constitutes material cooperation with intrinsic evil, and those Catholics who do so place by themselves outside with the full communion of Christ’s Church and under the judgment of divine law.” Newman added that Catholics in “this condition” ought to not receive communion until “they are reconciled to God inside the Sacrament of Penance, lest they eat and drink their own condemnation.”

According to the AP/Yahoo! News, some bishops spoke a lot more forcefully this election cycle than in 2004 to urge Catholics to create abortion the forefront concern in selecting a candidate, and a few went as far as to say Catholics “risked their immortal soul by voting for candidates who support abortion rights.” At the annual U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops General Assembly last week, bishops took a number of actions aimed at confronting the Obama administration more than its support for abortion rights. Nevertheless, the AP/Yahoo! News reports that bishops are much more divided on the problem of whether Catholics who diverge from the church’s antiabortion positions should receive communion, with each and every bishop setting the policy in his own diocese.

According to Newman, his letter was not intended to “make a partisan point.” He added, “In reality, in this election, for the sake of argument, if the Republican candidate had been pro-abortion, and the Democratic candidate had been pro-life, everything that I wrote would have been exactly the exact same.” Mary Ann Walsh, spokesperson for your U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, stated she was not aware of any other priests taking similar actions. Steve Krueger, national director of Catholic Democrats, said Newman “is acting beyond the authority of a parish priest to say what he did.” He added, “Unfortunately, he is performing so inside a manner that will be of great expense to those parishioners who did vote for [Obama]. There will be considered a spiritual cost to them for his words” (AP/Yahoo! News, 11/14).

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