On Monday The Lead covered the op-ed by Joe Feuerherd appearing in the Sunday edition of the Washington Post.
Today the Post has run a response by Sister Mary Ann Walsh, director of media relations for the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops:
The bishops never align themselves with any party or any candidate, yet Feuerherd presumptuously declares them for Sen. John McCain. He puts the bishops in the Republican Party despite that fact that on many of their positions, such as immigration and health care, they could be considered in the Democratic camp. He describes Pope John Paul as conservative, despite the fact that the media who heard him in Newark in 1995 said he sounded more liberal than the most liberal Democrat. In 1999, in St. Louis, Pope John Paul personally — and successfully — called upon the governor of Missouri to commute the sentence of a man on death row.
The current campaign shows that politics is too often a contest of powerful interests, partisan attacks, sound bites and media hype. In “Faithful Citizenship,” the Church calls for a different kind of political engagement: one shaped by moral convictions of well-formed consciences and focused on the dignity of every human being, the pursuit of the common good, and the protection of the weak and vulnerable. It stresses that Catholics need to be guided more by their moral convictions than by attachment to a political party or interest group. Catholic participation should help transform the party to which they belong; they should not let the party transform them in such a way that they neglect or deny basic moral truths.
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His final salvo, damning the bishops, is unworthy of both Feuerherd and The Post. It’s hard to imagine The Post giving its pages to a writer suggesting the outright damnation of the leaders of any other religious body. Feuerherd’s vitriol might be understandable if the bishops were concerned, like a typical special-interest group, only with what benefits them. However, the bishops’ defense of the right to life of the unborn is a principled commitment in justice to the good of others who are vulnerable and with no voice of their own.
A group calling itself the Catholic News Agency suggests Feuerherd could be subject to sanction by the church:
While describing himself as an opponent of liberal abortion laws, Feuerherd criticized Republicans and pledged his support for the Democrats. “Sounds like I’ll be voting for the Democrat — and the bishops be damned,” his essay concluded.
Canon lawyer Dr. Edward Peters vigorously condemned the curse. “To wish damnation on an individual or a group is to wish on them the absolutely worst fate conceivable: separation from God forever,” Peters wrote. “Catholics possessed of even a rudimentary catechesis know that one cannot invoke upon a human being any greater calamity than damnation, and that it is never licit, for any reason, to wish that another person be damned.”
Peters said Feuerherd’s “words of contempt” were not made in the heat of the moment. “Feuerherd’s curse, ‘the bishops be damned’, was expressed in cold, deliberate, prose intended for maximum effect in a prominent national publication.”
Peters noted that Canon 1369 canon law mandates the imposition of a “just penalty” for a person who in published writing “expresses insults or excites hatred or contempt against religion or the Church.” Another canon, 1373, commends “an interdict or other just penalties” to be imposed on a person who publicly incites animosities or hatred against an episcopal ordinary “because of some act of power or ecclesiastical ministry.”
“I believe Feuerherd has gravely violated both of these canons,” Peters said. He stated that by virtue of their office, bishops should impose canonical punishments upon Feuerherd.