You cannot have your "waffle" and your "wafer," too.

Bishop Thomas Wenski, the coadjutor Bishop of the Diocese of Orlando, wrote a commentary for the Orlando Sentinel recently.

..."getting it right" for a practicing Catholic means conforming oneself to the will of God as revealed to us through scripture and tradition and as definitely set forth by the teaching authority of the church. A practicing Catholic cannot invoke "conscience" to defy or disregard what the church definitely holds as true -- for a practicing Catholic doesn't create his own truth but forms his conscience according to the truth.

Bishops as teachers of the faith have no special competencies in the world of business or politics -- and in those worlds we have no regulatory or legal powers. But precisely as teachers of the Catholic faith we do have competence to tell businessmen or politicians or anyone else for that matter what is required to be a Catholic. It is totally within our competence to say that one cannot be complicit in the injustice of denying the right to life of an unborn child or an invalid elder and still consider oneself a good Catholic.

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