You may have heard the Pope is in town. Well, so is Our twice-divorced civilly-married pro-choice legendarily-adulterous Beloved Former Mayor. He decided to take in the mass at St. Pat's. He also decided to take communion. Problem.

As he left New York's Saint Patrick's Cathedral with his third wife, Judith, the failed US presidential candidate confirmed to Reuters he took communion from a priest.

Asked if he was uncomfortable with having broken the church ban on the divorced and remarried taking communion, Giuliani said, "No."

...

Catholics believe during Mass, the communion host and wine are transformed into the body and blood of Christ.

At Saturday's mass, the pope consecrated bread and wine that was distributed to the congregation by other priests. Giuliani did not take communion from the Pope himself.

Well, lots of stuff there

...Giuliani simply isn't the Catholic candidate he claims to be. He can't have a confessor. He can't receive the sacraments of penance, the Eucharist, or marriage. While bishops disagree about whether or not a Catholic politician who supports abortion rights can receive the sacraments, there is no disagreement about the consequences of divorcing and remarrying outside the church, as Giuliani did a few years ago.

...

"Any Catholic who remarries without annulment" assumes an "irregular status" within the church, says Monsignor Joseph Giandurco, who until recently was the canon-law expert at the seminary run by the Archdiocese of New York. Also a judge on the appeals court of the archdiocese's marriage tribunal and a canon-law adviser to Cardinal Edward Egan [of, well, St Pat's], Giandurco declined to answer questions about Giuliani individually, but speaking in general terms about someone with Giuliani's marital history, Giandurco added: "The marriage is not recognized by the church, and the person cannot receive communion or confession. He's not supposed to play a public role in the church." While a baptized Catholic is "Catholic forever," says Giandurco, a remarriage "breaks the covenant and objectively contradicts what the marriage bond signifies."

Specifically, this is what the Pope has to say about the subject

If the Eucharist expresses the irrevocable nature of God's love in Christ for his Church, we can then understand why it implies, with regard to the sacrament of Matrimony, that indissolubility to which all true love necessarily aspires...The Synod of Bishops confirmed the Church's practice, based on Sacred Scripture, of not admitting the divorced and remarried to the sacraments, since their state and their condition of life objectively contradict the loving union of Christ and the Church signified and made present in the Eucharist. Yet the divorced and remarried continue to belong to the Church, which accompanies them with special concern and encourages them to live as fully as possible the Christian life through regular participation at Mass, albeit without receiving communion, listening to the word of God, eucharistic adoration, prayer, participation in the life of the community, honest dialogue with a priest or spiritual director, dedication to the life of charity, works of penance, and commitment to the education of their children...

Finally, where the nullity of the marriage bond is not declared and objective circumstances make it impossible to cease cohabitation, the Church encourages these members of the faithful to commit themselves to living their relationship in fidelity to the demands of God's law, as friends, as brother and sister; in this way they will be able to return to the table of the Eucharist, taking care to observe the Church's established and approved practice in this regard.

judy-kissing-rudy-csa-0307.jpg

So, according to the Pope, who consecrated the wafers and wine Giuliani doesn't feel uncomfortable about illicitly partaking in with the whole world watching, the only way for him to be returned to communion with the church would be either to leave his wife or to, under the supervision of a priest or spritual director, live in perfect celibacy with his wife.

Ya think?

Otherwise, the Pope says that priests should withhold the Eucharist from people they know to be in an irregular marital state (and no, the possible secret annulment Giuliani sympathizers are floating wouldn't do anything to regularize a civil marriage to a twice-divorced woman) because the church should not be seen to condone that kind of thing

The Catholic Church still holds that remarriage after divorce, though extremely common, is the moral equivalent of adultery, and so bars a person in such circumstances from receiving Communion.

“I would say that a particularly painful situation is that of those who were married in the church, but were not really believers and did so just for tradition, and then finding themselves in a new, nonvalid marriage, convert, find the faith and feel excluded from the sacrament,” he said.

Protecting the feelings of people in such situations, however, is not held as sufficient reason to admit them to Communion. Calling modern marriage a sacrament that is frequently “celebrated without faith,” the Pope reiterated that for a priest to give Communion under such circumstances would only serve to further undermine the integrity of marriage.

“We know that the moment we give in out of love, we harm the sacrament itself, and its indissolubility appears weakened,” Pope Benedict said.

Right on TV, too. And it's not as if he didn't know.

Bill Donahue, the Catholic League's go-to guy on politicians being barred from receiving communion, had this to say in response to Giuliani's act of sacrilege and public disobedience to the Pope

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The priest who gave it to him? Not, I suspect, a happy man right now. According to Canons 915 and 916 of the Code of Canon Law, he was supposed to say no.

Way to go, self-identified theology student and seminarian wannabe Rudy.