John Kerrys
Religion
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 Kerrys 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. Its 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.
![[Breaker quote: Catholicism Lite?]](2004breakers/040928.gif) 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 Kerrys 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 infants skull in the
birth canal, with the extraction of its brain, isnt something to
which you should merely be personally opposed; its
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.
Kerrys 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 hasnt 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.
Joseph Sobran
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