Last month, TIME Magazine featured an article that shocked me for more than one reason: A nine-year-old Brazilian girl who was raped and impregnated with twins by her stepfather was excommunicated by the Roman Catholic Church for undergoing an abortion. Her mother, who helped the girl receive the procedure, and the doctor who carried it out were excommunicated as well. (The article doesn't say what happened to the father.)
Brazilians are angry about this – and rightfully so. First, Brazilian law holds that abortion is illegal except in cases of rape, or when having the baby would endanger the life of the mother. Tragically, both of those scenarios hold true in this case, and yet the Church still chose to strip this young girl of her membership in the Catholic Church, claiming that “she could have had a cesarean section.”
That's easy to say when it’s not your daughter who’s just had her virginity stolen from her by a man who is supposed to love her unconditionally; that’s easy to say when it’s not your daughter whose life is on the line, and when all you’re concerned with is Catholic dogma.
In this case, the Catholic hierarchy – more specifically, Archbishop Jose Cardoso Sobrinho, who announced the excommunication – failed spectacularly in living up to the Catholic Church’s mission of compassion. According to the article, Sobrinho said, “God’s laws dictate that abortion is a sin and that transgressors are no longer welcome in the Roman Catholic Church.” (Rape, evidently, is not enough to warrant excommunication.)
Sobrinho went on to instill a hierarchical view on the value of life: “Abortion is much more serious than killing an adult. An adult may or may not be innocent, but an unborn child is most definitely ignored. Taking that life cannot be ignored.” Yes, Your Eminence: Abortion is the murder of an innocent, and is a travesty. But how can you claim that any life is more important or worth more than any other? Who are you to say that the life of an unborn child is worth more than that of a terminally ill 78-year-old convicted murderer? I thought only God had that ability to judge.
The sadness of this case is overwhelming: A family was broken apart, and then kicked out of the institution that has incredible healing power; a nine-year-old girl’s virginity was taken from her; an unborn pair of twins was murdered. For the Church to do what it did to these “perpetrators” is a blow to the Church's credibility and reputation – when it takes up positions like this that are rigidly opposed to considering the complex ethical circumstances of a given situation, it only lends credence to the idea that the Church is an intolerant organization.
As someone who is against abortion, I challenge the Church to come up with some way to deal with abortion other than criminalizing it. With this case, the Vatican sent a message that it is not going to minister to those people caught up in situations where it seems like abortion is the only option; instead, it is going to turn them away.
With people like Archbishop Cardoso Sobrinho stupidly comparing abortion to the Holocaust – which, by the way, was an ideological, systematic execution of an entire people fueled by an irrational hatred – how will the Church ever be able to create a space for dialogue? According to Sobrinho, the Church doesn't want that: “We know that people have other ideas, but if they do, then they are not Catholic. We want people who adhere to God's laws.”
Your Eminence, mankind would be in big, big trouble if God only wanted people who adhere to his laws.
-Jose Martinez
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