New Jersey's Governor McGreevey caves:

Gov. James E. McGreevey yesterday bowed to pressure from several Roman Catholic bishops by agreeing not to receive communion at public Catholic Masses.

Meanwhile, in Massachusetts they're trying to reinstate the death penalty (AP story here). Have any of the pro-reinsatatement Catholics listed here been threatened with denial of communion? Coppola? Sullivan? Rodrigues? Keenan? Petrolati? Murphy? Sounds as if at least some of these folks are members of the True Church. Any of them get threatened yet?

It's true -- the Catholic church isn't absolutely against the death penalty. But here's what was said in 1997 when the Vatican issued modifications to the catechism:

Assuming that the guilty party's identity and responsibility have been fully determined, the traditional teaching of the Church does not exclude recourse to the death penalty, if this is the only possible way of effectively defending human lives against the unjust aggressor.

If, however, non-lethal means are sufficient to defend and protect people's safety from the aggressor, authority will limit itself to such means, as these are more in keeping with the concrete conditions of the common good and more in conformity with the dignity of the human person.

Today, in fact, as a consequence of the possibilities which the state has for effectively preventing crime, by rendering one who has committed an offense incapable of doing harm--without definitively taking away from him the possibility of redeeming himself--the cases in which the execution of the offender is an absolute necessity "are rare, if not practically non-existent." (NT: John Paul II, Evangelium vitae 56)

Go look at the AP story. There's a lot of talk about limiting the death penalty to horrific crimes and about establishing absolute certainty of guilt (a "no doubt" standard), but there's nothing about establishing whether the public could be protected by non-lethal means.