These prelates know the score:

Now the full weight of the Catholic Church is coming down on Nancy Pelosi. Bravo to Cardinal Rigali and Bishop Lori who join Archbishop Chaput in setting an example for their fellow Church leaders. Now, how about the Bishop of San Francisco? The story:

It’s about Nutty Nancy telling the clue-free Meet the Press man what’s RC teaching and what isn’t, in the cause of her man the Big O., the deucedly clever chap whose pay level doesn’t cover human rights for little people.  She cited Augustine in support of a three-month rule.  The prelates:

In the Middle Ages, uninformed and inadequate theories about embryology led some theologians to speculate that specifically human life capable of receiving an immortal soul may not exist until a few weeks into pregnancy. While in canon law these theories led to a distinction in penalties between very early and later abortions, the Church’s moral teaching never justified or permitted abortion at any stage of development.

Oh.  In other words, Peggy Noonan is right:

We know when life begins. Everyone who ever bought a pack of condoms knows when life begins.

To put it another way, with conception something begins. What do you think it is? A car? A 1948 Buick?

The prelates continued:

These mistaken biological theories became obsolete over 150 years ago when scientists discovered that a new human individual comes into being from the union of sperm and egg at fertilization. In keeping with this modern understanding, the Church has long taught that from the time of conception (fertilization), each member of the human species must be given the full respect due to a human person, beginning with respect for the fundamental right to life.

It is about time someone called her and other Catholics on it who trade on their being Catholic for political gain.

Wall St. Journal’s Market Watch has the Rigali et al. text.  Catholic News Service is working on it.  Rush L. beat them all to it:

[T]his is just embarrassing. As I’ve often wondered, is she genuinely this uneducated, uninformed, silly, stupid, whatever — and I’ve concluded there isn’t a word to describe the status of her brain.  The Catholic Church doesn’t know? The Catholic Church hasn’t stipulated?

Well Rush, you can hit many a Catholic church on Sunday and be unsure in the matter.

Catholic wrinkle here, maybe of moment:

“Sadly, Joe Biden’s tenure in the United States Senate has been marked by steadfast support for legal abortion” [said Fidelis president Brian Burch in a news release].

During the recent Democratic primary campaign Biden [called himself] “a long-standing supporter of Roe v Wade and a woman’s right to choose.”

Thing is, will he be refused Communion?

Is O’s pick

of pro-abortion Catholic Joe Biden to be his V.P. running mate “. . . a slap in the face to Catholic voters” and [does it pose] a major challenge for American Catholics[?]

as Burch says, having 

declared that Barack Obama has “re-opened a wound among American Catholics” by picking a pro-abortion Catholic politician like Joe Biden.

He’s a “committed Catholic,” O. said Saturday in Springfield at the unveiling, and there’s a weasel phrase, having multiple meanings in today’s religio-spiritual market. 

For instance, I’m committed, but not to alleged “social justice” teaching as purveyed in papal encyclicals, most of which goes far beyond one’s Christian obligations to do anything and is bad policy to boot. 

Read Thomas E. Woods, Jr.’s The Church and the Market: A Catholic Defense of the Free Economy — come along with me — for a spirited refutation of various aspects of Rerum Novarum of 1891, Quadragesimo Anno 40 years later, and even JP2’s Laborem Exercens 50 years after QA, all of which veer into statism or least assign considerable blame to employers who don’t pay a “family wage.”

The amount of nonsense sold as Catholic belief in these matters is amazing.  As Woods notes on p. 78,

To be sure, the popes themselves have never claimed that a favorable attitude toward coercive labor unionism [to name one economic issue] constitutes an infallible moral teaching, but it is easy to come away from much popular exposition of Catholic social teaching with that impression.

Direct killing of the innocent is another matter, also to be sure.  A privileged position is assigned anti-abortionism, therefore, in the Catholic hierarchy (of values, not prelates).

In any case, Biden as Catholic pro-choice running mate for the decidedly pro-abortion born-alive-bill-killer Obama is bound to raise hackles on fish-eaters coast to coast who are not stuck in spurious social-justice considerations and can’t get around that protection-of-the-innocent business that undergirds anti-abortionism.

Wait for a very hot story, in any case, when Biden goes for Communion and gets a blessing instead.  On the other hand, don’t wait, because it won’t happen.

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Reader D:

Yes, you’re right — Biden will pick an open-thinking church where Holy Communion is a right, not a privilege. Remember Kerry went to some “downtown Paulist Church” in Boston, I believe, where all God’s chillun can “take” Communion.

On the other hand, Reader B, who hates to capitalize:

by the guys in missouri for sure….  the same thing that happened to kerry will happen to him, i suspect.

Yes, Archbishop Burke of St. Louis, now in the Pope’s cabinet at Rome, nixed Kerry’s receiving, but K. did not test him, to my knowledge.