A Follow-Up on the Archbishop Who Excommunicated Doctors for Saving a Girl's Life

Back in March, the Catholic Church in Brazil made international news when Archbishop Jose Sobrinho excommunicated the mother of a girl and the doctors who performed an abortion on the 9-year-old girl who had been raped by her stepfather, a position the Vatican itself supported (with some internal dissent in Rome).

Well, while the Church will probably not be changing its stance anytime soon, Sobrinho won't have to worry about excommunicating anybody anymore - the Vatican has announced that Sobrinho is retiring. I don't have any high hope that the Vatican will apoint somebody more progressive to the post, but hey - even if the new archbishop shows a level of compassion slightly above Dick Cheney's, it will be a marked improvement.

Vatican Official Backtracks on Brazilian Girl's Abortion - "Insensitive, Incomprehensible, and Devoid of Mercy" Sounds About Right

In the wake of national and then international outrage over the Catholic Church's quickness to condemn and excommunicate those involved with a 9-year-old rape victim's abortion when her life was at risk, it comes as somewhat of a surprise that at least some in the Vatican are backtracking.

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.

Well, yeah - "Insensitive, incomprehensible, and devoid of mercy" pretty much sums it up. Fisichella went on to defend the Church's overall stance and teachings on abortion. Still, the fact that the head of the Church's Pontifical Academy for Life was critical of Archbishop Sobrinho's immediate and damning response, and the Church's defense of him, just goes to show how radical that stance was and is. At least somebody in the Vatican, for all of the problems I have with his own positions, had the decency to criticize the archbishop's and the Vatican's response to the situation with condemnation rather than with compassion.

(h/t The Latin Americanist).

...(Update) - Randy really gets to the crux of Fisichella's stance when he says, "the objection is to the public aspect of it." Absolutely. Fisichella is in no way interested in undoing or disagreeing with the Vatican's stance on abortion - he is, after all, a voluntary member of the Vatican community. But nobody in the Vatican is going to say, "well, our iron-fisted stance on abortion is probably wrong" - that's beyond the realm of even the most unreasonable expectations. So from an institution that we'll probably never see backtrack on the actual abortion issue in our lifetime, the acknowledgement that the public treatment of and response to the victim's circumstances, and the complete lack of compassion behind that public stance, is as good a concession as we're going to get from the Vatican. It's not much, but it's (slightly) better than nothing.

And for Its Second Act....MORE Anti-Woman Statements from the Vatican

Following up its damningly dogmatic view on abortion in Brazil, the Vatican this weekend published an article that claimed that the washing machine has done more for women's liberation in the 20th century than.....the contraceptive pill. And it published this yesterday...which was International Women's Day.


The gendered norms and completely regressive attitude of the Vatican towards women is manifest in this suggestion: that the value of good life is wrapped up in a symbol of repressive mid-1900s domesticity, and not in a medical option that gave women greater control of their own bodies and sexuality (not to mention the flawed gendered belief that only women did and/or do laundry.)


Still, it's nice of the Vatican to wrap up its contempt and objectification of women so simply for all to see.

Catholic Church's Unsurprising-but-Extreme Stance on Abortion Causes Outrage in Brazil

The Catholic Church in Brazil ended up making headlines this week with its dogmatic stance on abortion. A nine-year-old girl in Northeastern Brazil had been raped by her stepfather, and was pregnant with twins. Brazil does not allow abortion except in cases of rape or the danger of the mother's health, and this particular case fell under both of those categories, as doctors announced that the girl would die before she could give birth, simply because her uterus at 9 years of age simply could not foster twins. Thus, the girl underwent an abortion.

The Catholic Church, of course, came out on the wrong side of this issue once again, excommunicating the doctors who performed the abortion, as well as mother of the girl (but not the child-raping stepfather).

Archbishop Jose Cardoso Sobrinho of the coastal city of Recife announced that the Vatican was excommunicating the family of a local girl who had been raped and impregnated with twins by her stepfather, because they had chosen to have the girl undergo an abortion. The Church excommunicated the doctors who performed the procedure as well. "God's laws," said the archbishop, dictate that abortion is a sin and that transgressors are no longer welcome in the Roman Catholic Church. "They took the life of an innocent," Sobrinho told TIME in a telephone interview. " Abortion is much more serious than killing an adult. An adult may or may not be an innocent, but an unborn child is most definitely innocent. Taking that life cannot be ignored."

Of course, far from standing down, the Vatican fully supported Sobrinho:

Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, head of the Roman Catholic Church’s Congregation for Bishops, told La Stampa, an Italian daily newspaper, that the case was sad, but that “the real problem is that the twins conceived were two innocent persons, who had the right to live and could not be eliminated.”

Suffice to say, the issue is causing all kinds of outrage in Brazil, and let us be absolutely clear that, although there are many devout Catholics in Brazil, the overwhelming majority of the population side with the girl's family and the government on this one. Even Lula, a very ardent Catholic himself, was none-too-subtle in his views earlier this week, saying that he was bothered both "as a Christian and a Catholic" by the Archbishop's comments and stance and declaring that "I think, in this aspect, medicine is more correct than the bishop."

As I've commented before, the Church is quickly alienating any of its remaining support in its strongest bastion, Latin America. This is just adding to that, revealing a rigidity and intolerance that has been behind the Catholic Church for hundreds of years. One of the excommunicated doctors (who insists he will continue to attend mass) put the Church's idiocy best: "My sadness comes from the fact that the Church could choose the side of fraternity, but it chose the side of conflict. This isn't the Church that people like, that the people want. The people want a church of forgiveness, love, and compassion."

Thanks to its stance on issues like abortion and people like Sobrinho, people just aren't going to get that from Catholicism, and it's likely to continue its decline unless it makes some fundamental shifts.

...UPDATE - Having gotten around to the rest of the internets this afternoon, it appears that Scott and Randy have also gotten to this story (with Randy's including this particular bit of lunacy in Connecticut)