I was away in Bukidnon when I learned of Ted Kennedy's death. Even as I had wanted to check the Net for stories, the internet access there was at GPRS speed and so I did not.
Coming home from the seminar, I watched some clips of the funeral service and wondered what a great send-off it was for a man who seemed to have been on the wrong side of Catholic teaching most of his life. While I understand that we cannot judge the state of a person's soul (we read that Ted was visited by a priest many times during his last days, and so he may have 'fessed up, and that's that) and so the funeral mass was a most Christian/Catholic thing to do, I felt that perhaps some (even Catholics) would react to that liturgical event, maybe confused. But I left it at that and prayed for his soul.
Coming home from the seminar, I watched some clips of the funeral service and wondered what a great send-off it was for a man who seemed to have been on the wrong side of Catholic teaching most of his life. While I understand that we cannot judge the state of a person's soul (we read that Ted was visited by a priest many times during his last days, and so he may have 'fessed up, and that's that) and so the funeral mass was a most Christian/Catholic thing to do, I felt that perhaps some (even Catholics) would react to that liturgical event, maybe confused. But I left it at that and prayed for his soul.
Today I read Phil Lawler at Catholic Culture and the concerns I had then were given light.
In part, Lawler writes:
The great, unanswered question hanging over the congregation in Mission Church, and in the minds of the millions who watched the funeral Mass on television, was how the Catholic Church could arrange such a highly public tribute to a man who, over the years, was arguably the most powerful political opponent of the Catholic position on the central moral issue of our time: the battle to protect human life.
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