JOHN KERRY'S RELIGION
September 28, 2004

by Joe Sobran

     In his convention acceptance speech, John Kerry made 
a brief, vague reference to his "faith" and skipped over 
the subject even more quickly than he did his political 
career. A few months ago, it appeared that Kerry might 
have trouble with some Catholic bishops if he tried to 
take Communion, because of his consistent advocacy of 
abortion.

     But Kerry and his defenders insisted that he was a 
Catholic in good standing, and the issue faded away. 
Still, there were unanswered questions about how 
seriously Kerry took his Catholicism. Had he gotten his 
first marriage annulled before marrying Teresa Heinz? Why 
did he attend Protestant services instead of Catholic 
Mass, even taking communion in the Protestant rites -- 
things Catholics have always been forbidden to do?

     A long profile of Mrs. Kerry in THE NEW YORKER 
casually answers some of these questions. Judith Thurman 
writes, "After a brief courtship, a short period of 
cohabitation, and the signing of a prenuptial agreement, 
the Kerrys were married in a civil ceremony on Nantucket 
in 1995."

     There is a world of meaning here for Catholics, and 
for anyone who takes Kerry's professions of faith 
seriously. He and his wife, both baptized Catholics, are 
living together in defiance of Catholic teaching. In the 
eyes of the Church, their marriage is invalid: Catholics 
may not marry outside the Church. The issue of abortion 
aside, the Kerrys are both ineligible to receive 
Communion.

     Catholic rules on this are ancient and firm. They 
are no longer firmly enforced, since the Second Vatican 
Council has created (or been used to spread) the false 
impression that the "old rules" have somehow lapsed. In 
fact, annulments are now scandalously easy to obtain. 
It's become common for long-married couples with several 
children to get rulings that their marriage never 
existed. Annulments, once rare, have become the Catholic 
answer to no-fault divorce.

      Which makes it all the more remarkable that Kerry
didn't bother to wait for an annulment (which he claims
to have belatedly applied for recently) before marrying 
the widowed Teresa Heinz. This confirms the suspicion 
that Kerry is, in fact, a thoroughly secularized man, 
whose regard for Catholicism is minimal.

     And if Kerry takes Communion in Catholic churches, 
he is, in Catholic eyes, committing the grave sin of 
sacrilege -- receiving the Body of Christ unworthily, as 
St. Paul puts it. This would also make him a hypocrite.

     Some Catholic moral theologians argue that a 
prenuptial agreement makes a marriage invalid as well, 
since it shows that the parties are already contemplating 
divorce. They are supposed to be committing themselves to 
an indissoluble union. Nor may they cohabit before 
marrying.

     To Catholics, all this is far more significant than 
the details of Kerry's war record. He has tried to 
represent himself as a faithful Catholic, when he simply 
is not, and he knows it. His long record of promoting 
abortion is only part of the picture.

     Kerry has belatedly scrambled to say he disapproves 
of abortion, but nothing in his record gives the 
slightest hint of moral reservations about killing the 
unborn. This is simply the pro forma "personally opposed" 
gesture of nominally Catholic liberal politicians, as 
familiar as it is empty. Kerry in fact has favored even 
grisly late-term abortions, which the late Senator 
Patrick Moynihan, otherwise another pro-abortion 
Catholic, bluntly called "infanticide." The crushing of 
an infant's skull in the birth canal, with the extraction 
of its brain, isn't something to which you should merely 
be "personally opposed"; it's something that should make 
you sick.

     But what else should we expect of a liberal 
Massachusetts Democrat who has always idolized the 
Kennedys? In 1960, when John Kennedy became the first 
Catholic to be elected president of the United States, 
some people worried that he would act as a tool of the 
Vatican. Nobody need have the least worry that President 
John Kerry would let his Catholicism slow him down. 
Neither did President Kennedy, but we would learn that 
only much later.

     Kerry's religious ambiguity is one large reason he 
seems so hard to pin down. What does he really believe, 
and what difference does it make? He hasn't been pressed 
on his religious views as he has been on his Vietnam 
days, but he has featured his religion too as a key part 
of his makeup. It would be no intrusion on his privacy to 
ask him, politely, how his voting record would be 
different if he were non-Catholic -- or, for that matter, 
anti-Catholic.

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