Really, there doesn’t seem to be any limit to their evil. Not only does Catholic Bishop Thomas Tobin bar Rep. Patrick Kennedy from taking Communion (which he’s permitted to do under Catholic doctrine), he does it because Kennedy opposes the official Church stance on health care reform, and threatens any other priest who disobeys him. The only thing missing was the horse’s head.
Only…Patrick Kennedy is a Congressman. If he had bent to the will of the bishops, all of those dire predictions Republicans made about his uncle Jack back in the 60’s would have come to pass. You know. The ones about the Church being in charge, the US being the puppet of Rome, etc. All those.
Mullah Bishop Thomas ‘Taliban‘ Tobin, in his own words:
“He attacked the church, he attacked the position of the church on health care, on abortion, on funding,” Tobin said. “And that required that I respond. I don’t go out looking for these guys. I don’t go out picking these fights.”
Hmmmm. So much for Jesus’ teachings. That’s never stopped the Catholic church before and it surely won’t now. It is repugnant to see this priest publicly question Kennedy’s faith. Once again that prime Taliban characteristic emerges, where one doctrine (the doctrine of men as absolute authority and arbiter of salvation) trumps another (the doctrine of loving one another as Christ loved us).
Bishop Taliban Tobin also couldn’t resist dredging up Rep. Kennedy’s past struggles with drugs and depression, as if to offer Kennedy some excuse for ‘irrational behavior’. If it weren’t real, it would read like one of the worst Mafia movie scripts ever written.
This isn’t his first attack on Kennedy, either. Tobin’s been gunning for him since 2007 because of Kennedy’s anti-church stance on abortion rights. Awfully convenient for him to make it public and ugly on the 46th anniversary of his Uncle Jack Kennedy’s assassination, too.
It really makes the case for a complete (and I do mean complete) separation of church and state. Let’s start by requiring that any church whose leaders inject themselves into the political dialogue by extorting elected representatives with their salvation lose their full tax exemption, and I do mean full. Every last dime, retroactive to their first public statement.
Imagine that. The deficit would disappear in less than a year.
