Pastors May Defy IRS Gag Rule

Kerry said to be excommunicated

Los Angeles, Oct. 18, 2004 (CWNews.com) - A consultant to the Vatican has said Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry has incurred the penalty of excommunication from the Catholic Church.

The consultant made his statement in a highly unusual letter to Marc Balestrieri, a Los Angeles canon lawyer who formally sued John Kerry in ecclesiastical court for heresy.

Balestrieri, who launched his case earlier this year by filing a heresy complaint in Kerry's home archdiocese of Boston, told EWTN's "World Over" program on Friday that he had received an unusual, indirect communication from the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith regarding the pro-abortion stance.

February 17, 2005
Bishops' "Faithful Citizenship" undermined by conservative groups

By Joe Feuerherd

Diocesan social action directors charged with taking the church's election-year message to the faithful were harassed from below and, in some cases, subverted from above.

Harassment came from parish- and diocesan-based conservatives who viewed a second term for George W. Bush as a secular second coming; the subversion from some bishops and clergy who placed the "five nonnegotiable issues" promoted by a conservative Catholic group (abortion, euthanasia, embryonic stem cell research, human cloning, and gay marriage) over the teaching promoted by the U.S. bishops ...

Then, in early 2004, an El Cajon, Calif.-based conservative group, "Catholic Answers," published its "Voter's Guide for Serious Catholics," a 2,500-word pamphlet that urged Catholics to vote based on the "five nonnegotiable issues." Said the pamphlet, "It is a serious sin to deliberately endorse or promote any of these actions, and no candidate who really wants to advance the common good will support any action contrary to the nonnegotiable principles involved in these issues."

In the outreach effort that ensued, the diocesan social action directors were blindsided. Millions of copies of the "Voter's Guide for Serious Catholics" were distributed in church parking lots and foyers and inserted in parish bulletins. Catholic Answers took out a full-page ad in USA Today, and proponents of the nonnegotiables disrupted efforts to promote the bishops' official view of the 2004 election. It was political hardball, with some social action directors subject to e-mail campaigns in which chanceries were flooded with correspondence questioning their orthodoxy and commitment to church teaching ...

http://www.nationalcatholicreporter.org/washington/wnb021705.htm

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