The American Spectator

Washington Prowler

(Page 2 of 2)

p> NOW MAHONY br> The senior leadership of Roman Catholic Church continues to give aid and comfort to the Kerry campaign. The latest to step up is Los Angeles archbishop, Roger Cardinal Mahony , who met last week with John Kerry and his wife in Los Angeles, and announced that Kerry was welcome to receive communion from him or any priest in his diocese at any time. /p>

Under Catholic Church teaching, Kerry, who has consistently voted for and supported infanticide laws in his time in the Senate, should refrain from receiving the sacrament of Holy Eucharist. Some bishops across the country have announced that Kerry is not considered a Catholic in good standing with the Church. But two of the most senior church leaders in the United States, Theodore Cardinal McCarrick of Washington, D.C. and now Mahony, have met with Kerry, and, according to a source in the U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops, encouraged the Massachusetts Democrat's campaign.

"There is a large segment of the conference that supports Kerry and his progressive social and economic ideas," says the staffer. "This is, for them, a golden opportunity to support a Catholic in bad standing who can further their progressive goals on the impoverished, alternative lifestyles, HIV and AIDS, and globalization. They will take the good with the bad."

In fact, McCarrick, who is heading a committee studying how bishops should relate to Catholics who happen to be politicians, according the conference source, is said to have told Kerry to ignore the slings and arrows of religiously conservative bishops.

p>"The word is, Kerry was told that they are a vocal minority, with no standing in the hierarchy of the conference," says the staffer. br> /p>

topics:
Law, Iraq, NATO