Catholic Bishops vs. Kennedys
Very interesting op-ed by Timothy Egan in the NY Times:
Hanging front and center inside the classroom of the grade school I attended were pictures of two men: Pope Paul VI, and John F. Kennedy, the first Roman Catholic president. Each was revered almost without question, although we were taught that one could never tell the other what to do in their separate realms.
My experience was not unique. And so it was jarring to many Catholics to hear last month of a bishop in Providence, R.I., advising a Kennedy to refrain from receiving communion because of a public policy position the congressman had advocated in Washington.
History has always been a strong subject in Catholic education, but Bishop Thomas Tobin of Providence seems to have forgotten much of his, or at least failed to learn the lessons as they applied to American democracy.
It was John Kennedy, of course, who was forced to defend his faith before a roomful of skeptical Protestant ministers in Texas, two months before he was elected in 1960. In high school, the Jesuits had us memorize that speech.
“I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish,” candidate Kennedy said, “where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the Pope, the National Council of Churches of any other ecclesiastical source; where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general population or the public actions of its officials.”
It is no small irony, then, that Rep. Patrick Kennedy of Rhode Island, now the only member of Congress from America’s most prominent Catholic family, had his faith questioned by Bishop Tobin for his pro-choice position on abortion…
