Follow-up: Feuerherd runs foul of Canon Law, and Common Sense

Yesterday I noted, as part of a general commentary, Joe Feuerherd's slimy op-ed for the WaPo.

Today, my father Canonist Ed Peters tells us what can be done about this studied form of offensiveness:

To wish damnation on an individual or a group is to wish on them the absolutely worst fate conceivable: separation from God forever. CCC 1035. Catholics possessed of even a rudimentary catechesis know that one cannot invoke upon a human being any greater calamity than damnation, and that it is never licit, for any reason, to wish that another person be damned.

On February 24, National Catholic Reporter correspondent Joe Feuerherd, writing in the Washington Post, expressed his desire to see the bishops (of the United States) literally damned before he would fail to vote Democratic this Fall.

[Read what can be done about it here.]

There's really no excuse.

"Anti-Catholicism: the last acceptable prejudice."

update: Carl Olson also takes notice (and issue), and Ramesh Ponnuru at NRO does as well:

Feuerherd doesn’t take the tack that it is wrong in principle for the bishops to suggest that some types of political behavior can endanger people’s souls. It is hard to see how he could take that tack, given that he appears to believe, first, that there is such a thing as an eternal soul that can be damned or saved, and second, that moral choices can affect the outcome. Nor does Feuerherd argue, exactly, that the bishops are wrong to regard abortion as a grave injustice. He says that he is himself pro-life. Evidently, then, he believes that abortion is the unjust killing of innocent human beings, and the “right” to abortion therefore amounts to a license to commit an injustice of the gravest kind.

In other words, either Feuerherd is incapable of writing proper english grammar, or his claim to be "pro-life" is sarcastic in the worst sense, or he's utterly illogical. Again, what a fine argument he presents.