Cardinal Speaking for the Pope

I'm in Ohio and they are running Kerry ads almost non-stop.



From Cardinal's Communion ban backed:



"Cardinal Francis Arinze, a top Vatican official who said Friday that Roman Catholic lawmakers who support abortion rights should not receive Holy Communion, was speaking for the pope, local Catholic leaders said yesterday.



'He is the highest-ranking person in the whole chain under the pope with regard to the sacraments,' said the Rev. Joseph Koterski, head of the philosophy department at Fordham University.



Pope John Paul II said virtually the same thing in an encyclical fairly recently, he added.



'You can be confident that he is speaking also for the pope' and about Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., said Jack Healey of Bronxville, the retired director of the Archbishop Hughes Institute for Religion and Culture at Fordham.



'This has been bothering the bishops and it has obviously been bothering the Vatican that Catholic politicians are responding to the 'American situation' and not trying to impose Catholic understanding of abortion and human life. I think it will be a storm in the church,' he said. 'Short-lived.'' "