Archbishop Smith: A pro-abortion stance is irreconcilable with Catholicism. Period.

Yay!

Our episcopacy is showing some backbone on abortion.

This is awesome.

Now here's the test.

Will anyone deny communion, or even go so far as to excommunicate a Catholic pol who votes for abortion?


Archbishop Prendergast of Ottawa raised the prospect of denying Communion, under certain conditions:

The archbishop said he would not go so far as to advise Trudeau to no longer receive communion without meeting with him beforehand. He thinks that after Trudeau’s public statements a meeting would be “a good idea.”

“I don’t think you can make a judgment about someone’s faith position simply by what is said in the public,” he said. “There needs to be a meeting with myself, or with his parish priest, a priest who is in harmony with the Church’s teachings.”

Trudeau is a resident of Ottawa so canonically, as a Catholic, he belongs to the Ottawa archdiocese, he said. He is, however, from Montreal.

“I would respect a wish to consult with the Archbishop of Montreal (Archbishop Christian Lépine) if he wished, or with a priest that would be acceptable to the Archbishop of Montreal or myself,” Prendergast said.

Catholics are warned against taking the sacrament of Holy Communion unworthily, both in Scripture and in Canon Law section 915 which says: “Anyone aware of having committed a grave sin is obliged to refrain from receiving Communion without first obtaining absolution in the sacrament of Reconciliation.”

“We always have to presume the best of people unless we know for sure the interior state of their lives,” the archbishop said. “Someone might be in a state of sin when they come to Holy Communion, but I don’t know that.

I have to presume that person is right before God unless there are evident signs that’s not the case.

“If there are persistent signs of a resistance to hold the Church’s teachings, there would seem to be an incompatibility between what the Church understands and what the person is professing,” he said. “But no one from the beginning presumes to judge a person’s conscience.”

There appears to be even more back-pedaling from the Liberals on this subject.

I think it's all smoke and mirrors. They don't pro-lifers in the party.

Maybe it's time for pro-life liberals to start their own party.