Pope Warns Politicians Who Back Abortion

Alright! I'm glad to Pope decided to speak up about this publicly. You may support abortion rights and consider yourself a Christian. You may believe in God, you may be an otherwise decent person, but you are not Catholic. This is one of my biggest gripes with people I talk to about being Catholic. They complain that the Church isn't inclusive enough. There is no debate on this one. We believe abortion is intrinsically evil. If you don't, you aren't Catholic. Case closed.

My favorite version of this is my various acquaintances who don't like the Catholic church because they weren't allowed to get married in the Church. The argument goes something like this:

"Well, they wanted me to get my first marriage annulled. That's like saying the five years I spent with her meant nothing. Like we were never married."

Well duh! That's exactly what's being said. It's very simple. Either you were never validly married and were living in a state of mortal sin, or you were validly married and are not free to remarry if your wife is still alive. We believe marriage is a sacrament that joins two people together forever. If you don't believe that, OK, but don't asked to be married in our church and impugn our beliefs.

Sorry for the rant, but this situation has come up more times than I care to count. My favorite comment of all time though was when a Protestant friend told me,

"You don't really think that cracker is the body of Christ do you? If we thought Jesus was really in Communion we would crawl to church on our knees."

I guess he's never been to a Catholic church with kneelers, or seen the procession of the faithful up the stairs to a Church in Mount Adams during Holy Week. We believe, and we do get on our knees.

If you don't believe, please don't go around telling everyone your Catholic.