There was Lucy Killea, now 81 and reflective.

She had spoken out for abortion rights in a television campaign ad for a state Senate race, taking a stand that Maher said was “in complete contradiction to the moral teaching of the Catholic Church.”

“Consequently,” Maher wrote to her in a letter, “I have no other choice but to deny you the right to receive the Eucharist in the Catholic Church.”

Killea didn’t like it, but she accepted it. “I was disappointed,” she remembers.

While she took Communion elsewhere, she honored the local ban until after she retired from the state Senate in 1996.

….Killea doesn’t agree with what Maher did back then – nor does she think the hierarchy ought to deny other church members now.

“It’s a question of the separation of church and state,” she says. Killea contends her stands were a matter of private conscience and were not the church’s business. She also was elected to represent more than just Catholics, she adds.