Main issue regarding Kerry is not Eucharist but distortion of Church’s teachings: Weigel

Apr 26, 2004 / 22:00 pm

Papal biographer George Weigel said the real issue for United States bishops regarding Sen. John Kerry is not whether he should receive Holy Communion – a matter for his local bishop – but how he is deliberately misrepresenting the teachings of the Church on abortion and life issues.

Weigel, a prominent Catholic theologian and a leading commentator on issues of religion and public life, provided these comments in an interview with NewsMax.com in mid-April.

The main issue is being sidelined by all of the attention given to the Democratic presidential candidate’s eligibility for the Eucharist, a matter that belongs to his local bishop, Archbishop Sean O'Malley of Boston, said Weigel.

Instead, Weigel emphasized, the most important thing for U.S. bishops to do is to clearly state, as a collective, that the pro-abortion senator is misrepresenting the Church's pro-life teaching when he says it is “a sectarian position, which cannot be imposed on a pluralistic society.”

In doing this, Weigel told Newsmax.com, Kerry “is willfully misrepresenting the nature of the Church's position – by suggesting that this is something analogous to the Catholic Church trying to force everyone in the United States to abstain from eating hot dogs on Fridays during Lent.”

“This is simply false,” Weigel told NewsMax.com. The Church's pro-life teaching, said Weigel, is something that can be engaged by anyone “because it's a position rooted in basic embryology and in basic logic, and anybody can engage that."