Well, that would be when the excommunication threats (and actual excommunications) are over issues where the liberals agree with the bishops on the moral issue.

After all, Cardinal Ritter in St. Louis desegregated the archdiocesan Catholic schools years before Brown v. Board of Education and was applauded for threatening his opponents with excommunication for upholding Catholic teachings on racial justice. Not only that, but Archbishop Rummel of New Orleans actually did excommunicate desegregation opponents in New Orleans back in 1962.

How did liberals react to Rummel's actions? "We salute the Catholic Archbishop," the New York Times editorialized. "He has set an example founded on religious principle and response to the social conscience of our times." An editorial in the Nation applauded Rummel's initial excommunication threat and cited Ritter's action in 1947 as a precedent. Certainly, it seems, liberals don't really mind mixing religion with politics as long as it's their political agenda being promoted.

Rep. DeLauro, Mr. Giuliani and other Catholic politicians may choose to see ecclesiastical punishments as blunt political weapons used to club them into submission on a controversial issue. For the bishops, however, such punishments are imposed as a last effort to be taken against those who, in their judgment, are publicly flouting the laws of the church.

Of course, if liberals really think that the threats of the Pope and bishops to take disciplinary actions against Catholic politicians who refuse to protect innocent human life from the barbarism of abortion, perhaps they could prevail upon the New York Times to retract and denounce its earlier editorial supporting the same sort of use of ecclesiastical authority to oppose racial discrimination. Or they could just admit that they are not merely pro-choice, but are instead actively and affirmatively pro-abortion.

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