This week I read a report in the indispensable LifeSiteNews about American Catholics who aren’t going to sit idly while their Church drifts toward the socialist, pro-choice left. In the process, it highlighted one practical step faithful Catholics can take to resist these trends.

Apparently some Catholics in Virginia got sick of the scandal of avowedly Catholic vice presidential candidate Tim Kaine receiving Holy Communion like a Catholic in good standing — when canon 915 of Church law forbids him from doing so, and instructs his bishop and pastor to refuse it to him. Neither his bishop nor his pastor has done so. So these faithful citizens decided to go after the scandal at its root, by picketing Tim Kaine’s Catholic parish. As LifeSite recounts:

Roughly a dozen pro-life activists protested Sunday outside of pro-abortion, pro-homosexuality Democratic Vice Presidential candidate Sen. Tim Kaine’s Catholic parish. “Sen. Kaine has failed in his duty as a Catholic public servant to defend the preborn and Fr. Arsenault has failed in his duty as pastor to admonish Sen. Kaine and to instruct the rest of his congregation on the teachings of the Catholic Church regarding the sanctity of human life,” Virginia pro-life activist Maggie Egger told LifeSiteNews in an email. “I, along with a group of Catholics from various parishes around the Diocese of Richmond, went to St. Elizabeth’s yesterday to do what Sen. Kaine and Fr. Arsenault will not: defend our preborn brethren by exposing abortion as the decapitation and dismemberment of tiny human beings, instruct the parishioners of St. Elizabeth’s on the teachings of the Church, and inform them that Sen. Kaine publicly supports the decapitation and dismemberment of tiny human beings under the guise of being ‘personally pro-life,’” Egger said.

Every four years, millions of Catholics vote for pro-abortion politicians with an apparently clear conscience. (Obama got majorities of Catholic votes in both elections; imagine the scandal if a majority of Catholics voted for a segregationist.) At the same time, as the Pew Study reports, 40 percent of adults who were raised as Catholics have left the Church never to return. These two trends are linked, as the very same tepidness enables pro-choice Catholics, and drives out some fervent souls who decide to worship elsewhere. Note that GOP vice-presidential candidate Mike Pence seems to be one of the fervent; he joined his wife’s evangelical church and stayed pro-life. Tim Kaine stayed Catholic and became pro-choice.

How does something like that happen? Pope John Paul II, Pope Benedict, Pope Francis, the Catechism of the Catholic Church and almost 2000 years of Church tradition (going back at least to the Didache) have been absolutely clear that abortion is murder. Full stop. For the government to permit it is criminal, akin to Southern states that used to wink at lynching. Politicians who support legal abortion are “public sinners” akin to members of the Mafia. They have no more place receiving Communion than Al Capone.

How could someone like Jesuit-educated, former missionary Tim Kaine go to Mass every week, hob-nob with his local bishop and not get the Catholic pro-life memo? Maybe nobody sent it. LifeSiteNews delved into the parish which Kaine attends, and found the following:

Kaine’s parish, St. Elizabeth Catholic Church, gave him a standing ovation at Mass after he became Hillary Clinton’s running mate. His pastor, Father Jim Arsenault, praised Kaine in an NPR interview. “I know that he’s definitely against capital punishment and works to help defend those who are on death row,” Arsenault said. “The church has a teaching with regard to we’re pro-life, and we believe in that seamless garment of life. We respect sometimes lawmakers make difficult decisions.” Arsenault was commenting on how as governor of Virginia, Kaine oversaw several executions. The priest told NPR that he thought the issues most important to Kaine were women’s pay and “social justice issues.”

And there we have our answer. Catholics like Tim Kaine have apostatized on the Church’s most fundamental moral teaching, that human life is good and sacred and cannot be snuffed out for our sexual convenience. When they defend such radical evil for the sake of naked ambition, they are applauded by their fellow-parishioners who think it’s cool to have a celebrity with them each week. And such politicians are protected by their pastors and bishops. Priests like Fr. Arsenault latch onto empty, shallow slogans like the “seamless garment” that have never been endorsed by the Church, just repeated as a mantra by countless tenured Jesuits till it’s hard to tell the difference.

God bless Maggie Egger for leading this witness to life and faith, and LifeSiteNews for reporting on it. Egger and company surely had more pleasant things they could have done with their Sunday morning than stand outside some posh parish and denounce its local hero to the glares of his friends and neighbors. They won’t win any prizes or praise from that quarter.

You see, by taking this stand these pro-life Catholics committed the one unforgivable sin in the suburban, lax post-Catholic church: They made a scene. They shattered the facile illusion of worldly, progressive Sadducees who are exquisitely cozy in our poisoned, post-Christian culture. Egger and company stood as a sign of contradiction, around the cross, and can expect to receive the same contempt as their Savior who hung on it.

We need millions more Catholics like that, confronting politicians, pastors and bishops across the country. If only for the sake of peace and quiet, they might start preaching the Gospel.