Somehow I suspect that most of the bloggers and other commentators who went (sometimes appropriately) batshit over the excommunication of the Brazilian mother who procured an abortion for her sexually abused 9-year-old daughter won’t have quite as much to say about the latest developments in that sickening saga (H/T David Gibson, who has much more):
Archbishop Rino Fisichella, president of the Pontifical Academy for Life, criticized what he called a “hasty” public declaration of the excommunication of the girl’s mother and the doctors who aborted the girl’s twins.
The girl “in the first place should have been defended, hugged and held tenderly to help her feel that we were all on her side” he wrote in the Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, March 15.
“Before thinking about excommunication, it was necessary and urgent to protect her innocent life and bring her back to a level of humanity of which we men of the church should be expert witnesses and teachers,” he said.
“Unfortunately, this is not what happened and it has impacted the credibility of our teaching, which appears in the eyes of many as insensitive, incomprehensible and devoid of mercy,” he said.
[…]
Fisichella criticized the way Archbishop Sobrinho handled the situation.
“Only because the archbishop of Olinda and Recife hastily declared the excommunication of the doctors” did this story of despicable, yet all too common, violence against girls and women make newspaper headlines, he said.
Fisichella said that because of the Brazilian girl’s young age and her “precarious state of health her life was in serious danger” by continuing the pregnancy.
“How should one act in these cases?” he asked, underlining that the girl’s case represented an “arduous decision for doctors and moral law itself.”
Doctors deserve respect for the difficult decisions they must often grapple with, he said, adding that no one nonchalantly makes life-and-death decisions and to even suggest it “is unjust and offensive.”
He said the Catholic principle that upholds the sanctity of life is unshakeable and “abortion has always been condemned by moral law as an intrinsically evil act.”
However, because excommunication is incurred automatically at the moment a direct abortion is carried out, “there was no need to declare with such urgency and publicity a fact that occurred automatically,” he said.
Fisichella said the church can still be firm with its moral principles and at the same time reach out and show mercy toward others.
He told the young girl in his written article: “We are on your side. We feel your suffering and we would like to do everything that would help you restore the dignity that you have been deprived of and the love that you will still need.
“There are others who deserve excommunication and our forgiveness, not those who have allowed you to live and who will help you regain hope and trust despite the presence of evil and the wickedness of many people,” he said.
As in the much-discussed case of the Holocaust-denying Bishop Williamson, the fact that the Brazilian archbishop may have had some claim to doctrinal correctness is in itself no excuse for the horrible way in which this situation was handled; by my lights, anyway, both the archbishop and the Vatican prefect who initially stuck up for him should be shut away in a dark room and never again allowed within fifty feet of a microphone. All the more reason, of course, why the Vatican really needs a PR department to work alongside the folks who deal with the dogmas.
Filed under: abortion, media/culture, religion
Is excommunication an appropriate punishment for a woman who has an abortion and or a doctor that performs one? As a secular liberal, I don’t have a dog in this fight one way or the other. But I was actually surprised that excommunication is applied to abortion. I mean, I’ve never heard of that being done (though that could just be the fact that I am not part of the Catholic community).
Related to that, would it be accurate to say that unless the life of the girl was endangered by the pregnancy it would have been, according to Catholic teaching, a grave sin? In other words, if this girl was 22 instead of 9, would the moral calculus for having an abortion be different (as I understand the social con position, mental anguish does not count)?
I hasten to add the following: 1) I am not trying to be tendentious or 2)combative. Rather I am trying to have a dialog. There are some right to life issues, where I sometimes agree with the social conservative position such as monogamous marriage. There are other times, that while I disagree, I can see where the other side is coming from (e.g. second and third trimester aboritons). But the fact that there’s a controversy over a 9 year old rape victim having an abortion or embryonic stem cell research, the social conservative position (Catholic or otherwise) is completely incomprehensible to me and I am trying to understand it.
Hurrah! It’s “Ask an Amateur
TheologianCanonist” time!*Well, it’s certainly the canonically appropriate punishment, though the fact that the girl was under the age of 17 means (I think) that she couldn’t be (and, I’d say, shouldn’t have been) excommunicated. But the crucial reason why, as you say, you’ve never heard of this being done is that the penalty of excommunication for procuring, performing, or assisting in the procurement or performance of abortion is automatically incurred; there’s no need for a bishop to announce it. And given the seriousness of what abortion involves, this hardly seems inappropriate to me.
On a first approximation, yes, though as I understand things “gravity” requires a particular sort of mental attitude that could perhaps be absent in any given case.
Aside from the fact that the life of a 22-year-old would probably be far less likely to be put in danger from the circumstances of pregnancy and childbirth, no; though once again, I believe that you can’t be excommunicated unless you’re at least 17 (or 18?), and of course it would be harder for a child to have the sort of mental disposition that makes a sin truly grave.
Does this help?
* All answers subject to modification in the light of correction by better-informed readers.
To clarify things, it was the doctors and the girl’s mother who were excommunicated – BY THEIR OWN ACTIONS.
The excommunication occurred automatically by what they did – they were not excommunicated for their acts, they did it themselves by committing such atrocities.
The Bishops merely announced publicly that such acts (abortion – which is the murder of the unborn) concur abortion.
The fact that those in the mass media, who claim to be reporting “news”, have no clue as to what they are reporting on is another matter, but just as grave.
That may be right, but part of the point is that if the excommunications were incurred automatically then there was no need to announce them; this only made worse an already terrible situation. Moreover, if the procedure was, as it very well may have been, necessary to save the girl’s life, then it wasn’t an excommunicable act.
In a day and age where people do not seem to know what is right and what is wrong it is necessary to make public announcements. How this is done and can be done are maybe another issue – however, the mass media’s business is to misrepresent real news (in order to create sensationalism and therefore to create “interest” and therefore to sell papers or increase/support viewers).
What evidence was presented the girl’s life was in danger?
A mere assumption of her age being the determining cause is in error. Sadly, in the USA daily there are many girls who are 9, 10 and 11 who give birth with no complications.
This is not a woman.
A childs body is not prepared to give birth.
It could kill her or ruin her health for the rest of her life.
The unborn child is from RAPE and INCEST.
Where is you compassion for this poor child?
Isnt that an ATROCITY?
Or have those behaviors become part of the cannon of the church now??
Normalized?
Dr. Smythe,
You asked: “What evidence was presented the girl’s life was in danger?”
For one, she was 9 years old and 66 pounds–her stature is probably shorter and smaller than that of all these “sad” girls in the USA giving birth with “no complications.” Apparently, Catholic medical people think that a C-section would have been fine, seeing as her body is not capable of giving birth vaginally (i.e. her hips etc. aren’t anywhere near that of an adolescent or post-adolescent human female).
[BUT psychological and emotion health are also an issue here, but let's just bracket superfluous concerns such as as those. Afterall, the girl HAD been repeatedly raped sinced she was 6. I'm sure carrying her step-father's baby for 9 months wouldn't be that much more traumatizing. Especially, considering that it would have avoided making her culpable for her mother's and doctor's excommunication.]
I don’t know all of the details, but for the physical health of the child (the one carrying the baby, not the baby-in-utero), at what point would a c-section be performed so as to ensure her health? 9 months is probably not possible. Even 8 or 7 months might not be possible. What if her doctor foresaw her not being able to carry the fetus [to clarify for those who refuse to use medical terms--the developing human being in her womb past the stage of embryo]past 2-4 months and determined that it would be best to remove it before it got to that point?
When you asked “What evidence was presented the girl’s life was in danger?” you infer that child’s doctor should have presented evidence to the general public and to the Church to determine (according to the coherent terms of philosophy, probably) if the girl’s life was in danger. I have no idea what sort HIPA laws exist in Brazil, but I’m guessing the doctor probably couldn’t just open the details of his “evidence” to all of us.
This seems to be a case when the desired black and white of Catholic moral theology (all abortion=”atrocity”) enters into the gray area. The tricky thing here is that the primary intent was to preserve the health and life of the girl, not to abort the baby.
A case such as this–which ought not to have been made so public–might (and I say might, because I do not know all the detail) be more along the lines of a pregnant woman diagnosed with cancer–even though the chemo will probably terminate the pregnancy, the intent is to kill the cancer, not the baby. Here, moral theology looks to intent.
But asking how many angels dance can dance on the head of a pin might be a sick logic game to play with this case.
Dr. John Smythe, please attend your “dealing with Humans” classes more regularly. You’re coming off as quite a jerk, sir. Anyone with your attitude most likely doesn’t know a lot of females, probably because they avoid you. Sorry to those women who can’t avoid you; their lives must be horrible.
For the humans who have read this post, let’s keep in mind that this whole scandal started with a horrible series of crimes against a child, “the least of these”, who we are supposed to protect. The Church should have dealt with this issue first, then tried to find a way to reconcile their beliefs and canon law with the unfortunate mother and doctors who had to make this difficult decision.
The Church is meant to shepherd its followers, not punish them. they are people not machines. Sometimes they do things the Church doesn’t like. What, should we just kick’em out? You got too many people sittin’ in your pews? I don;t think this is going to bring in more.
There are not “many” 9 and 10-year-old girls in the US who, “sadly” or not sadly, give birth without complications, much less with twins, as this poor little child was carrying. Not “many” in a year, let alone “daily.” That is a thoroughly preposterous statement.
Yes, well “Dr. Smythe” has given solid evidence of being a thoroughly preposterous person, so par for the course, I guess …
This debacle, the “no condoms to fight AIDS in Africa” proclamation, and the ex-excommunication of an unrepentant Holocaust denier…
Sounds to me like the Church is choosing moral consistency over moral clarity.
Enjoy your irrelevance.
As an atheist liberal Jew, I’ll be honest — It’s making me quite happy to watch your Church slowly implode in this manner over issues like these which seem to come daily.
Catholic theology, from the perspective of secular humanism, gets pretty much everything wrong about human existence and the human purpose; the sooner this cancer is excised from the public understanding of morality, the better for all of us.
Here’s hoping a poor little girl stuck in this situation 50 years from now won’t even know the word “Catholic”, much less have any idea what the Catholics would say about her predicament. Here’s hoping the world will have moved on from such silliness.
That old anti-Semite Voltaire and I can make common cause on this one, I think.
Gee, that’s charming. Thanks for sharing your sentiments.
You think that’s rude? But forcing a 66-pound child to carry twins of her rapist to term is moral?
Well, we’re in different ethical universes, apparently.
Huh? What? When did I say that the girl should have been forced to carry the children to term? One upshot of the statement I excerpted – and then defended at some length in the comments – was that there was good reason to think the girl shouldn’t have been required to do that.
Maybe just different linguistic universes, then …