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Canada’s Catholic League Says Prime Minister Automatically Excommunicated

TORONTO, October 18, 2005 (LifeSiteNews.com) – As reported previously by LifeSiteNews.com, the Toronto Star published an Oct. 11 article by regular columnist Joey Slinger which slammed the Catholic Church’s right to discipline its members and called for seizure of the property of Catholic institutions. Today’s Star carries a rebuttal in which the president of the Catholic Civil Rights League supports the assertion of Calgary’s Bishop Fred Henry that Prime Minister Paul Martin has indeed automatically excommunicated himself.

Philip Horgan, President of the Catholic Civil Rights League, responds, “The situation of a Catholic politician is no different fundamentally than that of any other Catholic, in that those who explicitly reject key Church doctrines are excommunicating themselves.”

On October 11, Slinger wrote, “So the Pope is thinking about excommunicating our Prime Minister, is he? In the religion game, that's called hardball.”

“We can play hardball too. How about he can excommunicate our Prime Minister and we can get rid of the tax exemption on Catholic Church property?”

Slinger made the suggestion, jokingly he claims, that should the Pope dare to say that Paul Martin’s actions as a Prime Minister and his profession of Catholicity are at odds, the Canadian government should seize Catholic property. “They'd have to start selling their real estate. Failing that, we'd have to seize it and auction it off. It's happened before. It was a fairly popular medieval screw-you gesture.”

Slinger is perfectly correct, history is indeed replete with examples of despotic governments suppressing the Catholic Church out of greed for its property or to suppress its doctrines in favour of a rival ideology. A famous example was the dissolution of the English monasteries and other Church properties by Henry VIII. The French revolutionaries did the same just before they started Guillotining priests and nuns. The Soviet Union seized immense Church holdings and sent millions of Christians to Siberian gulags. Should Canada wish to follow in these footsteps, there is no shortage of helpful examples about how such seizures are traditionally accomplished.

Horgan points out the double standard in Slinger and most Canada’s left-of-centre journalists. “Where was his outcry against our Prime Minister when Joe Comuzzi was forced to resign from cabinet when he followed his conscience and opposed the same-sex marriage bill?” he writes.

Horgan concludes, “It is not surprising that a member of the media would threaten to spike the charitable benefits of many Catholic or other religious institutions in order to force their adherents to adopt their own orthodoxy on this issue. It is a rather limited measure of tolerance.”

Read previous LifeSiteNews.com coverage:
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2005/oct/05101107.html

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