The author of the weekly Catholic Preaching column in the Boston diocese paper, The Anchor, is the paper editor, Fr. Roger Landry. Fr. Landry was ordained by Cardinal Sean O'Malley of Boston.
In three successive weekly columns Fr. Landry has written about the Kennedy situation. We strongly recommend reading all three columns (not just our excerpts), reflecting on them, and then passing this posting to as many people as you can.
CatholicPreaching.com Senator Kennedy's Legacy Sept. 4th, 2009
We have to add, however, that one of the reasons why Kennedy’s example was so injurious to the Church was because the pastors of the Church, for the most part, made the imprudent call to do little or nothing about it beyond general teaching statements that they hoped offending politicians would apply to themselves. There were no real consequences, and as a result, Senator Kennedy, scores of other Catholic politicians, and millions of American Catholic lay people concluded that the Church’s teachings in defense of human life cannot be that important if those who publicly and repeatedly act in violation of it do so with impunity. It would be very hard for an abortion-supporting Catholic politician to have watched Senator Kennedy’s very public and panegyrical funeral rites and not have concluded that the Church’s teachings on life are, in the end, a very small matter indeed. It would have been even harder for such a politician or others who support the evil of abortion to have been inspired toward conversion.
This leads to one of the most important lessons that pastors in the United States need to draw from the history of the Church’s interactions with Senator Kennedy for its future engagement of other pro-abortion Catholic politicians. Despite the good intentions to try to engage him, teach him, and help bring him to conversion, the strategy failed. There were many words given at the Senator’s exequies about his “private faith,” but private faith is not enough. “Faith without deeds is dead,” as St. James poignantly reminds us. The Church has a responsibility to help bring people from “private faith” to see the consequences of it in public actions, and, in the Senator’s case, we didn’t succeed.
CatholicPreaching.com Learning from Our Mistakes Sept. 11, 2009
When we examine the education-alone approach of pastors with respect to pro-choice politicians, we see that it has basically become a personally opposed, publicly pro-choice position as well. There’s obviously a clear personal repugnance on the part of pastors to the pro-choice Catholic politicians’ separation between faith and moral action, schizophrenia between private and public personality, and lip service to the Church’s teachings. Many pastors have sought to exercise their teaching office, stating forthrightly what abortion is and what the responsibilities of all legislators are with respect to it. All of their teaching, however, has been trumped by the weightier educational value of the de facto “law” that has left everything to the conscience, however ill-informed, of the pro-choice Catholic politicians. These men and women have learned over time that, regardless of what canon law says, they are at liberty to ignore the Church’s teachings on life. Even though the U.S. bishops have taught with one voice that pro-choice Catholic legislators should not present themselves to receive Holy Communion, if they pay no heed to that teaching and present themselves anyway, they have observed that in practice they will almost never be denied. With Senator Kennedy’s funeral, they have now grasped that even a 100% pro-abortion voting record will not only not prevent them from having a Catholic funeral, but will not even stop them from receiving possibly one of the most publicly panegyrical Catholic funerals in U.S. history.
The upshot — these smart men and women have concluded — is that the Church’s practice is essentially “pro-choice” with respect to “pro-choice” Catholic politicians. The politicians’ own determination in conscience, erroneous or not, is given greater weight than, combined, the truth proclaimed by the Church, the duty to protect the politicians’ souls from a potentially mortal wound, and the responsibility to do all that is possible according to one’s office to try to stop the killing. The education-alone approach has failed for the same reason that the personally opposed, publicly pro-choice position has led to massive abortion on demand: the nature of sin is that the easier it is to commit, and the fewer the consequences for doing it, the more sin we’ll have.
CatholicPreaching.com Lessons to be Learned Sept. 18, 2009
This brings us to the second controversy about the funeral from which we need to learn. There have been many, especially among those who thought highly of Senator Kennedy overall, who scolded as classless and un-Christian any post-mortem criticism of the Senator, even of his public actions. To do this, they said, was equivalent to casting the first stone (Jn 8:5); it violated the Biblical principle of not judging lest we be judged (Lk 6:37); and it was an affront to the dictum, which many erroneously think comes from the Bible, of never speaking ill of the dead. This controversy, however, flows from misconceptions of what Jesus and his Church actually teach.
To condemn one’s actions is not necessarily — and certainly not in this case —to seek to put the person to death, in this life or in the next. Jesus, after all, did not excuse the actions of the woman caught in adultery, for which she could have been condemned under the law, but rather told her to go and sin no more.
To judge a person’s external actions in the light of the Gospel, moreover, is not the same thing as judging the person, which is precisely and uniquely what Jesus forbids. It should also be noted that Jesus’ prescription against judging means not just that we should never play the part of God and ascribe someone to hell, but also that we should never take on the role of God and pronounce someone in heaven, either. Catholic teaching is that, except in the rare cases of a deceased baptized infant or a canonized saint, we do not know in what state a departed loved one is after death. Yet many people who mistakenly rebuked those who criticized Senator Kennedy’s abortion advocacy for supposedly judging the Senator’s soul themselves thought nothing of judging the Senator’s soul and deeming him in paradise. It is because we do not know the eschatological status of most of our loved one that we pray for them to the mercy of God — and pray more the more we love, and the more we humbly admit that our loved one was a sinner, like us, in need of prayer.
Three fine columns which we hope will be widely read in their entirety. The total reading time is about 15 minutes.
Mr. Kennedy was Augustinian in his approach to his own life and church.
Posted by: thea mcginnis | September 18, 2009 at 01:32 PM