TORONTO, April 16, 2014 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Sun News contributor Faith Goldy made the case last week during primetime that Liberal Party leader Justin Trudeau, who calls himself Catholic, should be formally excommunicated from the Catholic Church because of his staunch support for abortion.
“Apart from being the drama teacher turned Liberal leader, Justin Trudeau is a self-professed Catholic and abortion extremist. By my read: that earns him the badges of heretic and excommunicant,” said Goldy, who filled in for Michael Coren’s show The Arena on April 9.
While the Church has no specific law allowing for excommunication of Catholic politicians who support intrinsic evils such as abortion or same-sex “marriage,” a prominent canonist has said that there is an avenue by which to do it.
Trudeau has publicly admitted that his support for abortion contradicts Catholic teaching, despite calling his own personal faith an “extremely important part of who I am and the values that I try to lead with.” He said in 2012 that he would rather Quebec separate from Canada than see it part of a country that restricts abortion or ban same-sex “marriage.”
Trudeau has consistently voted against pro-life initiatives such as the 2010 Bill C-510 that would protect pregnant women from coercion to abort (Roxanne's Law) and the 2012 Motion 312 that called for a committee to study the country’s 400 year-old definition of “human being.”
The Catholic Church teaches that abortion — that is, the direct killing of an unborn child — is morally evil since it strips away the inviolable right to life of an innocent person.
The Church, emphasizing the gravity of abortion, also teaches that any Catholic who formally cooperates in an abortion automatically excommunicates him/herself from the sacramental life of the Church, except for confession.
Goldy said Trudeau’s abortion advocacy “most seriously offend[s the Church’s] core teachings and truths,” arguing that he has “fallen into heresy” by denying the Catholic truth of respect-for-life and therefore deserves excommunication.
In 2011, when the Catholic pro-life organization American Life League called for the excommunication of 62 Catholic congressmen who voted against defunding mega abortion-provider Planned Parenthood, canon lawyer Dr. Edward Peters explained that a local bishop is free to establish a particular law for his diocese.
Excommunicating pro-abortion politicians “would almost certainly require the establishment of a new penal law and the specification of the penalty of excommunication with an eye toward enforcement against future actions,” he told LifeSiteNews at the time. “No canon currently penalizes any form of legislative activity per se by Catholics (even terrible actions as supporting Planned Parenthood).
In this way, Bishop Fabian Bruskewitz famously excommunicated all members of Planned Parenthood and other groups in his diocese in 1996.
Peters also noted that priests always have recourse to canon 915, which requires ministers to bar those “obstinately persevering in manifest grave sin” from receiving Communion.
“In the case of a politician or other public figure who acts against the moral law in a grave matter and yet presents himself to receive Holy Communion, the priest should admonish the person in question and then, if he or she persists in approaching to receive Holy Communion, the priest should refuse to give the Body of Christ to the person,” said American Cardinal Raymond Burke, a prominent canon lawyer and head of the Apostolic Signatura, in an interview published last month by LifeSiteNews.
Goldy ultimately believes that Canadian Catholic leaders need to get more serious with dissenting Catholic politicians.
“Pro-abort politicos who coddle the Catholic vote by flashing membership cards are more popular and powerful than ever,” she said.
“But, despite an established legal structure to do something about it, the Catholic Church is allowing these politicians to get away with murder.”