Why Newt and not me?

Another complaint from exile - worse than a complaint, actually. A shriek of outrage.

Newt Gingrich has announced his candidacy, and it’s going to be just too infuriating for those of us exiled from the Catholic Church because of divorce and remarriage to hear himself-righteously intoning about his appropriation of the religion. Since when does he own it? Unlike the rest of us who came up through the ranks, trying to live as Catholics, he storms in and demands annulments of not only one but TWO marriages (Jackie seems to be alive still) AND GETS THEM! Although I guess I shouldn’t be surprised – when wasn't the the institution itself owned by rich old guys swaggering around importantly?

Still, it is easier to read about all those convenient medieval annulments, like Charles IV’s after he had assented to having his wife locked up on the pretext of adultery, than this one. This one cuts too close; I have not taken communion since I remarried, figuring that I didn’t write the rules of the system, but when I entered into it as a married person, vowing before God and man that I would stay with Chris until death parted us, I was going to be playing within the rules of that system. Otherwise I would have just gotten married by a justice of the peace in the first place. It’s not like the Catholic Church is ambiguous about what it requires of you when it agrees to marry you.

But Newt, for some reason, is special. He doesn’t have to play by the rules that hold for the rest of us peons. No, despite the fact that he dumped wife number one for wife number two while wife number one was suffering with cancer, cheated on wife number two with wife number three for six years, all the while working for Clinton’s impeachment, he still gets to waltz up to take communion. Can someone explain to me why he does and I don’t?

So what does the Pope have to say about this? According to Zenit, “Addressing the issue through his Apostolic Exhortation on the Eucharist, ‘Sacramentum Caritatis,’ the Pontiff underlined the relation between the Eucharist and indissolubility of marriage. Benedict XVI says that the Church must welcome with special love the divorced faithful who have remarried and, as such, cannot receive Communion. ‘We all know that this is a particularly painful problem for people who live in situations in which they are excluded from Eucharistic Communion, and naturally for the priests who desire to help these people love the Church and love Christ,’ said the Pope during a meeting July 25 in a church at Introd, the northern Italian town near where he spent his summer holidays."

Well, not much of a painful problem for Newt. Only for the rest of us. The rest of us are told, sorry, a marriage is a marriage. To a divorced person. In a Lutheran, Baptist, Methodist, church, whatever. Marriage, all of them, count for the Catholic Church as INDISSOLUBLE. Newt, in contrast, gets his annulment from wife number 2 because she had been married to someone else. As for Jackie, I don't know. Did he in fact manage to get that one annulled? Information is not easily available.

I think that I deserve an answer to why Newt and not me. I deserve to know why Newt, Rudy Giuliani, the Kennedys, etc., get to participate in the sacraments and I don’t. Or, to be more precise, I deserve the courtesy of an honest answer to my question. Because obviously the answer is that because they are important white guys and I am an insignificant woman. I want the Pope to come out and say it.