"Proportionate Reasons" again

Thanks to Bill Cork, I found this Catholic News Service story, in which Dominican priest (and one heck of a theologian) Augustine DiNoia (of the Dominican's St. Joseph province of the Eastern U.S.) explains what that "proportionate reasons" thingy in Ratzinger's June note meant (see my post on this below). DiNoia's take is important, because he is the undersecretary for the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, of which Ratzinger is the prefect. A few excerpts...

The memo was certainly not intended to clear the way for Catholics to vote for candidates who are in favor of laws permitting abortion or euthanasia, but rather to clarify that the simple act of voting for such candidates might not per se justify one's exclusion from Holy Communion...

The problem is that it's difficult to determine the purpose, or "moral object," of an act of voting, DiNoia said. "The only thing we could say is, a person might come to be in the state of mortal sin and therefore unworthy to receive Communion if they voted precisely with the moral object of extending abortion or the provision of abortion. But that would be the only case where that would happen...

The entire article is worth reading. In short, DiNoia refutes critics on both the right and left who think that Ratzinger opened a mile-wide exception with this note.

I'd also recommend checking out this post from Catholic [?] Kerry Watch on this.