{"id":335,"date":"2009-03-16T12:35:37","date_gmt":"2009-03-16T12:35:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/pontifications\/2009\/03\/more-excommunications-miscommu.html"},"modified":"2009-03-16T12:35:37","modified_gmt":"2009-03-16T12:35:37","slug":"more-excommunications-miscommu","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/2009\/03\/more-excommunications-miscommu.html","title":{"rendered":"More excommunications miscommunication"},"content":{"rendered":"

Another coda to the terrible story of the 9-year-old girl in Brazil whose serially abusive stepfather impregnated her with twins<\/a>, leading her mother to take her for an abortion on the advice of doctors who said her life was at serious risk. The story shocked Brazilians, but it was made worse when the local archbishop announced that the girl’s mother and the doctors were excommunictaed. (There were early reports that the child was declared excommunicated, too, but as she is under 17, that wasn’t canonically possible.) A top Vatican official, Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, publicly backed the Brazilian churchman, Archbishop Jos\u00e9 Cardoso Sobrinho of Olinda and Recife, according to this CNS story<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Now another top Vatican official, Archbishop Rino Fisichella, President of the Pontifical Academy for Life and an apparent up-and-comer in Rome, wrotes in L’Osservatore Romano<\/em> that the excommunications had been a mistake. Richard Owens of the London Times<\/em> writes from Rome<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

“Before thinking about an excommunication it was necessary and urgent to save an innocent life”, he said. The excommunication had been decided on and publicised “too hastily”. <\/p>\n

Writing in L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper, Archishop Fisichella noted that the excommunications had rebounded on the Church. “Unfortunately the credibility of our teaching was dented. It appeared in the eyes of many to be insensitive, incomprehensible and lacking in mercy.” The girl “should have been above all defended, embraced, treated with sweetness to make her feel that we were all on her side, all of us, without distinction.” <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Owens also notes that last week the National Conference of Brazilian Bishops said the excommunications of the mother and doctors were wrong–the girl’s mother acted “under pressure from the doctors,” who said the child’s life was at risk, and a church official said only doctors who “systematically” conducted abortions should be excommunicated. (The doctor in this case had publicly defied the archbisop and said he would continue going to Mass.)<\/p>\n

Fisichella and the Vatican were no doubt keenly aware of the gap between the act of mercy toward the schismatic bishops of the SSPX and this apparent lack of pastoral concern. But his words are just right in this case, IMHO.<\/p>\n

PS:<\/strong> A CNS story just moved <\/a>with the latest, and more details. Some good stuff:<\/p>\n

\n

Fisichella criticized the way Archbishop Sobrinho handled the situation.<\/p>\n

“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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

“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.”<\/p>\n

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.”<\/p>\n

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.”<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Another coda to the terrible story of the 9-year-old girl in Brazil whose serially abusive stepfather impregnated her with twins, leading her mother to take her for an abortion on the advice of doctors who said her life was at serious risk. 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He came by all those vocations by accident, or Providence, during a longer-than-expected sojourn in Rome in the 1980s. Gibson began his journalistic career as a walk-on sports editor and columnist at The International Courier, a small daily in Rome serving Italy's English-language community. He then found a job as a newscaster and writer across the Tiber at the English Programme at Vatican Radio, an entity he describes as a cross between NPR and Armed Forces Radio for the pope. The Jesuits who ran the radio were charitable enough to hire Gibson even though he had no radio background, could not pronounce the name \"Karol Wojtyla,\" and wasn't Catholic. Time and experience overcame all those challenges, and Gibson went on to cover dozens of John Paul II's overseas trips, including papal visits to Africa, Europe, Latin America and the United States. When Gibson returned to the United States in 1990 he returned to print journalism to cover the religion beat in his native New Jersey for two dailies. He worked first for The Record of Hackensack, and then for The Star-Ledger of New Jersey, winning the nation's top awards in religion writing at both places. In 1999 he won the Supple Religion Writer of the Year contest, and in 2000 he was chosen as the Templeton Religion Reporter of the Year. Gibson is a longtime board member of the Religion Newswriters Association and he is a contributor to ReligionLink, a service of the Religion Newswriters Foundation. Since 2003, David Gibson has been an independent writer specializing in Catholicism, religion in contemporary America, and early Christian history. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Boston Magazine, Commonweal, America, The New York Observer, Beliefnet and Religion News Service. He has produced documentaries on early Christianity for CNN and other networks and has traveled on assignment to dozens of countries, with an emphasis on reporting from Europe and the Middle East. He is a frequent television commentator and has appeared on the major cable and broadcast networks. He is also a regular speaker at conferences and seminars on Catholicism, religion in America, and journalism. Gibson's first book, The Coming Catholic Church: How the Faithful are Shaping a New American Catholicism (HarperSanFrancisco), was published in 2003 and deals with the church-wide crisis revealed by the clergy sexual abuse crisis. The book was widely hailed as a \"powerful\" and \"first-rate\" treatment of the crisis from \"an academically informed journalist of the highest caliber.\" His second book, The Rule of Benedict: Pope Benedict XVI and His Battle with the Modern World (HarperSanFrancisco), came out in 2006 and is the first full-scale treatment of the Ratzinger papacy--how it happened, who he is, and what it means for the Catholic Church. The Rule of Benedict has been praised as \"an exceptionally interesting and illuminating book\" from \"a master storyeller.\" Born and raised in New Jersey, David Gibson studied European history at Furman University in South Carolina and spent a year working on Capitol Hill before moving to Italy. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter and is working on a book about conversion, and on several film and television projects.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/author\/dgibson"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/335","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/128"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=335"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/335\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=335"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=335"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=335"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}