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As the Irish Parliament prepares to consider a bill to legalise some abortions, the head of the Vatican’s canon law tribunal has said Catholic politicians who support the bill should be refused Communion in the hope of inspiring a “conversion of heart”.
“There can be no question that the practice of abortion is among the gravest of manifest sins,” Cardinal Raymond Burke said in an interview with the Irish newspaper Catholic Voice.
On the question of Communion for pro-abortion politicians, he said any politician who favours legal abortion should be admonished by his pastors, and “as long as he continues to support legislation which fosters abortion or other intrinsic evils, then he should be refused Holy Communion”.
Cardinal Burke, an American, heads the Apostolic Signatura, the highest judicial tribunal in the Catholic Church.
The Fine Gael-controlled Irish parliament has said it will introduce legislation to legalise abortion where the mother’s life is deemed to be at risk, to conform Irish law to a December 2010 ruling from the European Court of Human Rights.
The cardinal said Catholic politicians have the duty to support all legislation that will “most reduce the evils which attack human life and the integrity of marriage”.
They cannot vote for any legislation which would confirm or advance “evil”, but they may support legislation to reduce such evils if they acknowledges those evils and the need to work to eliminate them.
Cardinal Burke stressed that the Catholic Church’s rules on the need to receive Communion worthily are based on Christians’ relationship with Jesus Christ.
Someone who persists in “manifest grave sin” should not receive Communion “because of his love of our Lord and his sorrow for the grave sin which he is committing against our Lord and His Holy Church”.
“In my own experience,” he said, “when I have informed Catholic politicians who were supporting anti-life or anti-family legislation not to approach to receive Holy Communion, they have understood and have followed the discipline of the Church as it is set forth in Canon 915.”
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