Wafer for Wafflers (as long as they're GOoPers)

Reading "Governor signs death warrant for Osceola County killer", again exposes the hipocrisy displayed by the Catholic Church on the abortion and death penalty issues. "Jeb!" is a loud and proud Catholic and a loud and proud advocate of the death penalty; yet, the Catholic Church to my knowledge has never criticized "Jeb!"'s outspoken advocacy of the death penalty and, more importantly, his role in carrying it out.

John Kerry's pro-choice stand subjected him to vicious condemnation from officials in the Catholic Church, including this extreme piece of political hackery from Bishop Wenski in Orlando, featuring the a variation on the Bush flip-flop theme: "You cannot have your 'waffle' and your 'wafer' too." Wenski's points are summarized here as follows:

Another US bishop has stepped up to the front lines of the battle in the US Catholic Church over the reception of communion by pro-abortion, dissenting Catholics. The coadjutor bishop of Orlando Florida, Thomas Wenski, has published a pastoral statement in which he calls pro-abortion Catholics who demand to receive communion "boorish and sacrilegious." He suggests that they are in a worse moral position than Pontius Pilate after his condemnation of Christ. ...

It is extremely rare for Catholic bishops to criticize each other in public. However, bishop Wenski in his statement made a not very veiled reference to the reaction of some US bishops, such as Washington's Cardinal McCarrick and Los Angeles' Cardinal Mahoney, who have said that sanctions and public rebukes may ultimately harm the pro-life cause.

Fair enough, Bishop Wenski is entitled to an opinion about how the Church should enforce its views on one of its central tenets, abortion.

Now, for a little consistency, let's see some condemnation for perceived hipocrisy in a Catholic politician a little closer to home, say, the Governor of Florida. It is clear - though anti-choice extremists in the Catholic Church spin on their heads to draw distinctions - that Catholic doctrine opposes the death penalty:

Pope John Paul II has declared the Church's near total opposition to the death penalty. In his encyclical "Evangelium Vitae" (The Gospel of Life) issued March 25, 1995 after four years of consultations with the world's Roman Catholic bishops, John Paul II wrote that execution is only appropriate "in cases of absolute necessity, in other words, when it would not be possible otherwise to defend society. Today, however, as a result of steady immprovement in the organization of the penal system, such cases are very rare, if not practically nonexistent." Until this encyclical, the death penalty was viewed as sometimes permissible as a means of protecting society.

In 1999, on U.S. soil, the Pope made his point undeniably clear:

In January 1999, John Paul II, who had written an earlier encyclical on the issue, brought his anti-death penalty crusade to the United States. "I renew my appeal," he declared in St. Louis, "for a consensus to end the death penalty, which is both cruel and unnecessary."

While wingnuts like Pat Buchanan and Antonin Scalia whine that the Pope is wrong (See "Scalia vs. the Pope" ("Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia has pitted his formidable brain against the Catholic Church and its increasingly strong stand against the death penalty")), it is official position of the Catholic Church that the death penalty is no longer permissable in civilized society.

Why, then, was it that Kerry was savaged from coast-to-coast by the U.S. Catholic hierarchy, yet "Jeb!" has been given a free pass (even as "Jeb!" actively works to make it easier for the government to execute human beings and ignore appeals from the Church)? Why is it that Kerry was skewered (for relatively moderate pro-choice views) by the Catholic leadership, yet prominent Catholics, like Buchanan and Scalia can publicly assert that the Church is wrong on the death penalty issue, and it is considered only "'friendly' dissent" within the church; I recall no calls from the Church to deny communion to Scalia or Buchanan.

If the Wenski's of the world are to be consistent, let's hear them say, "you can't have your death penalty and your wafer too".