On CNN

COOPER: I talked to a lot of Catholics today who are frankly kind of stunned by what you’re doing and they said that what you seem to be doing is turning the sacraments into a weapon. Is that what they were meant?

SHERIDAN: Well, if you’ll read the letter carefully you’ll see that nowhere in there do I talk about denying communion, so using the sacrament as a weapon doesn’t seem an appropriate characterization.

I’m appealing to Catholic consciences, calling on them to be as well informed as they can and if a Catholic knowingly promotes or encourages through voting what is known to be evil behavior then I believe, I truly believe that we as voters are complicit in that behavior and we must refrain ourselves from approaching the sacrament until we have been reconciled.

COOPER: You picked though certain topics, I mean gay marriage, euthanasia, stem cell research, the pope speaks against the war in Iraq, why these subjects?

SHERIDAN: Well, the issues that I’ve chosen to speak about in this letter are what we understand to be intrinsically evil in and of themselves. The issues that you think of, while important in having moral consequences and moral dimensions to them, are not and have never been declared by the church to be evil in and of themselves. So, for example, the church has never taught and does not now teach that the imposition of the death penalty is in all circumstance evil.