Monday, November 17, 2008

Denver Priest Equates Vote for Obama as Murder

I swear, the Catholic Church is lurching towards further lunacy and illegal endorsement of candidates more and more with each passing day. A reader sent me a link to an article in the Denver Post about one rational and thinking Catholic who is calling it quits with the fetus obsessed, gay hating and anti-woman Roman Catholic Church. I continue to find it ironic that the Catholic clergy who are so obsessed with abortion, do not give one wit about the sexual abuse of children. Moreover, they increasingly, like their evangelical counterparts, obsess over making sure that children are born yet endorse candidates who would eliminate or reduce funding for programs required to ensure children have health care and otherwise survive and have a quality life. Likewise, none of them seem to have the moral courage to raise their voice to demand accountability on the part of bishops and cardinals (including Benedict XVI) who enabled or covered up the sexual abuse of minors. The hypocrisy is beyond belief. Here are some story highlight:
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Maria Orms feels like she is going through a painful breakup — not from her husband but from the church in which she was born and raised. Orms calls herself and her husband "cradle Catholics." Both sides of their families have been Catholic as far back as they can remember. . . . Then the presidential election opened a divide between her and church leaders who teach that opposition to abortion should be the focus of Catholic political life.
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Orms said she had been disturbed by a videotape of Colorado's three bishops, played during Mass before the election, urging Catholics to vote in opposition to abortion. However, the final wedge between her and Catholicism was a line in the Nov. 9 bulletin of the Immaculate Heart of Mary Church in Northglenn. Pastor Gregory Ames congratulated those who voted "pro-life" rather than for President-elect Barack Obama: "You will never face a victim of abortion with blood on your hands."

Orms said it was confirmation to her that the church is both becoming increasingly political — and in a right-wing fundamentalist direction that doesn't square with her other Catholic values. . . . Catholics across the state and the country have reported feeling pressured from the pulpit to vote for McCain.
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Orms' husband, Gene Sears said, to him, taking a single issue, even one of such great importance as abortion, to determine a parishioner's value and whether that Catholic can stand before God with pride is "flawed logic." Sears wrote a letter to Ames: "Over 1 million dead in Iraq over failed policy and hubris, Father. Who speaks for them? You speak of the Holocaust, yet point your parishioners toward a political ideology that tacitly supported genocide through inaction."

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