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Sen. Kennedy was not a role model for anything Catholic, reader says

How sad that the Sept. 4th issue of The Criterion should have an editorial on the Kennedy family and a ¾-page article on Sen. Edward Kennedy’s funeral.

The man consistently voted against the most basic of human rights, the right to life.

It seems to me it matters not what other human rights he stood for if he refused this.

He had, over the years, received a 100 percent rating from the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League (NARAL).

As your article stated, he favored Roe v. Wade, was a chief sponsor of a bill to limit protests outside abortion clinics (which I had done early in the fight), favored embryonic stem-cell research (adult stem cells have proven much better) and opposed the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act. How un-Catholic does one have to be in order to be recognized as such?

Cardinal Roger Mahoney of Los Angeles would have us believe he “struggled with this aspect of his Catholic faith … .”

I’m sorry, I don’t see the struggle. His religion was in one hand, his politics in the other, and he clearly and repeatedly chose politics. Were you trying to give an air of respectability to someone who always seemed to put his Catholic faith on the back burner?

In another part of the article, Cardinal Mahoney also says “the voiceless, the powerless and the most needy of our citizens have lost a great champion … .” Sen. Kennedy did not champion the unborn, and who is more voiceless and powerless than they?

Another question: How many babies never saw the light of day, never had a chance to experience this wondrous thing we call life, because Sen. Kennedy chose to vote constantly, always, against this chance for them?

I am sure there are many Catholics across the United States who are as unhappy as I am to see the pomp and circumstance of his funeral.

We look to our hierarchy to lead us. Sen. Kennedy is not a role model for anything Catholic, and to give him this amount of honor is a slap in the face to those Catholics sincerely trying to live their religion.

- Barbara L. Maness, Vevay

There is no reason for Sen. Kennedy’s eulogy in Catholic newspaper

With all due respect to Editor Emeritus John Fink, with whom I have been respectfully disagreeing in print for many years, I do not believe Sen. Edward “Ted” Kennedy deserved to be eulogized in The Criterion.

No matter how much money and tireless effort he poured into his many liberal causes, the fact remains that being pro-life is not a “cause” or a “movement”—it is a commandment!

Without being judgmental of his personal sins, and trying to justify my own heartfelt statement that “The Criterion is a champion for pro-life issues,” I am having a hard time trying to reconcile the necessity of an editorial about the Kennedy family against the number of babies who never lived to grow up and read it—thanks to Sen. Kennedy’s “conflicted struggle,” which left him feeling “trapped” by his liberal position.

- Alice Price, Greenfield