Back to the middle ages
Don't kiss, don't tell, or don't get Communion

I saw this news story yesterday. The sheer hypocrisy of the priest is flabbergasting -- sin is OK, as long as nobody knows about it?

That's if exercising one's rights as an American, and standing up for one's beliefs is a sin. That, apparently was the sin that got the lesbian couple excommunicated. They dared to write their legislator in support of same-sex marriage, and it got into the newspaper. Terrible. Now everybody knew the couple was gay, and apparently the only sinners in the church, because they were the only ones excommunicated.

Hypocrisy. Gay discrimination. Power play.

Priests like this would like to return to the dark ages, when they had more complete control over people. A word from the priest and people were shunned. Excommunication was a life or death matter.

I'm not just picking on Roman Catholic priests. There are plenty in the Episcopal Church making the same kind of rumblings. Wrong politics, wrong "manner of life" = out.

Last year during Lent, the bishop of this diocese wrote a piece in the diocesan newsletter in which he suggested withholding Communion might be used more often to "discipline" members of the flock. Some gay and lesbian members were afraid they might approach the Communion rails at their churches and be turned away.

See my entry from March last year here

The fuss over that died down, with no one denied Communion, at least that I know of, thank God.

The sin is in using the Sacraments, using the body and blood of Christ as an instrument of power.

God knows our all our sins, public and private, and he will judge us all, priests included.

Here's the story:

Gay couple denied communion after stand
After taking a public stand for same-sex marriage, a gay couple were
notified they are no longer welcome at Catholic communion.

By KATHLEEN MILLER
Associated Press

GILLETTE, Wyo. --
Leah Vader and Lynne Huskinson, a lesbian couple who got married in
Canada in August, sent a letter recently to their state legislator
decrying a Wyoming bill that would deny recognition of same-sex
marriages. The lawmaker read the letter on the floor of the
Legislature.

Soon after, the local paper interviewed the couple on Ash Wednesday and
ran a story and pictures of them with ash on their foreheads, a mark of
their Christian faith.

It wasn't long after that that the couple received a notice from their
parish church telling them they have been barred from receiving
Communion.

"If all this stuff hadn't hit the newspaper, it wouldn't have been any
different than before -- nobody would have known about it," said the
couple's parish priest at St. Matthew's, the Rev. Cliff Jacobson. "The
sin is one thing. It's a very different thing to go public with that
sin."

Catholics deemed sinners in the eyes of the church are sometimes taken
aside and privately advised not to take Communion. But Cheyenne Bishop
David Ricken, gay Catholic organizations and a national church
spokeswoman said they could not recall any previous instance of a U.S.
bishop denying the sacrament to a gay couple in writing.

Now Huskinson and Vader say they are struggling to reconcile their
devotion to the church with their devotion to each other.

"You spend half your time defending your gayness to Catholics," Vader
said, "and the other half of your time defending your Catholicism to
gays." ...