Now, there’s someone who’ll never be Pope!

So, it turns out that not absolutely every high-up member of the Catholic Church is a cruel child-killing excommunicating bastard.

Just most of them.

A Vatican-based prelate has condemned the rapid proclamation of the excommunication of the doctors who performed the abortion for the nine-year-old Brazilian girl who was found to be pregnant with twins, having been sexually abused by her stepfather.

It’s not clear whether he thinks that, ultimately, the doctors (and the mother? she seems to be absent from this article, which is an issue in itself) should have been excommunicated eventually – his criticism seems to be more about the quick announcement of it.

I haven’t written about this terrible situation before, because it’s been widely written about in other places (such as here, here and here, just to point to a few).

Now Archbishop Rino Fisichella has acknowledged the moral problems involved in not performing an abortion on the girl. He’s said it’s a difficult decision – I don’t agree with that, but he seems to also be saying it may have been the right decision (or, at least, a right decision, or an understandable or forgiveable decision) in the circumstances.

Which is a fuckload more than anyone else high-up in the Catholic Church is doing.

Quote from the newspaper article:

Fisichella criticised the archbishop’s public denunciation, writing that 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.”

Here, the archbishop recognises that the important thing in supporting a rape victim is, well, supporting her. Give that man a cookie!

Fisichella stressed that abortion was always “bad.” But he said the rapid proclamation of excommunication “unfortunately hurts the credibility of our teaching, which appears in the eyes of many as insensitive, incomprehensible and lacking mercy.”

[emphasis added]

Ya think?

Gee, maybe that’s because it is “insensitive, incomprehensible and lacking in mercy”.

Still, at least there’s one person in the upper echelons of the awful institution who can recognise that hey, maybe there’s something good about saving the life of a nine-year-old girl.

Guess he didn’t want to be Pope anyway.