Giuliani highlights hypocrisy of the church and Catholic pols

[NNN0LHI]

http://thephoenix.com/article_ektid41721.aspx

A week after Bishop Thomas J. Tobin gained national attention for his condemnation of Rudy Giuliani’s position on abortion, one has to wonder what happens next.

Will Tobin tighten the net and try to force campaign volunteers to divorce themselves from Rudy? Will he argue that supporters cannot remain Catholics if they work for Giuliani’s election? Will he banish them from the communion rail for ignoring his dicta on abortion? snip

Heavy contributors to Catholic Charities are divorced and remarried with ease while their blue-collar equivalents are banished from the pews. The late Mafia kingpin Raymond L.S. Patriarca is given full burial privileges in a Catholic cemetery, while a beloved Catholic priest who chose suicide is stripped of the reverend title in his obituary.

Loving relatives are denied the chance to be witnesses at their loved ones’ weddings, baptisms, or confirmations because of one priest’s judgment that they are not worthy. In some cases, that same priest is later defrocked for sexual abuse of young people.

Giuliani, a former seminarian, is twice divorced and remarried, a public philanderer and arguably a political slut (Giuliani nominated — and then withdrew — his friend Bernard Kerik, an unscrupulous libertine, for the nation’s top security job). Why anyone even considers him a Catholic at this point may be the eighth glorious mystery.

[LiberalFighter]

1. Probably not much different during the Middle Ages