Beyond Livid

I am beyond livid.

Sister Margaret McBride, a Catholic nun in Phoenix has been excommunicated by the local bishop for being part of a hospital ethics panel which permitted the abortion of an 11 week fetus in order to save the life of the 27 year old mother of four.

The patient had "right heart failure" and her doctors felt that continuation of the pregnancy would have "a mortality rate of 100%."

The hospital had two choices: terminate the pregnancy and save the life of the mother, or don't terminate the pregnancy and allow the death of both the mother and the child. They chose to terminate the pregnancy.

Now Sister Margaret has been excommunicated because, according to the bishop, a good outcome cannot justify an evil act.

Well, isn't it nice that the Catholc Church has finally acted swiftly to enact punishment against someone perceived of doing wrong in the eyes of the church.

Too bad it's against a woman trying to save the life of a mother of four, not a priest trying to take the innocence and childhood of a child or several children. If it were a priest who had been molesting children for years, he'd just go to a halfway house and then after a period of time sent to another parish to work with more children. (Oh wait--that's what they do with pedophile priest.)

The gall of these stupid old men. The unmitigated gall!

This church which has protected pedophile priests for decades, and only now is being slightly more open about things because they got caught literally with their pants down, has the effrontery to excommunicate a woman placed in an impossible situation: Choose abortion, kill the baby. Choose NO abortion, kill the baby and the mother both.

According to a statement by the office of the Diocese of Phoenix, "Formal cooperation in an abortion constitutes a grave offense. The Church attaches the canonical penalty of excommunication to this crime against human life."

Oh well...if it's a crime against human life obviously vengeance must be swift and terrible.

Unlike pedopohilia, another crime against human life, which apparently can be shoved under the carpet until the police get wind of it.

When asked "what is the purpose of excommunication," the Bishop's office responded, "The purpose is to repair scandal, to restore justice and to reform the offender.

Anybody know how many of the hundreds of pedophile priests were excommunicated before being sent back out to work with children again...? According to the Rev. Thomas Doyle, a canon lawyer, no pedophile priests have been excommunicated.

Did you read that? NO PEDOPHILE PRIESTS have been excommunicated.

"When priests have been caught, Doyle says, their bishops have protected them, and it has taken years or decades to defrock them, if ever.

"Yet in this instance we have a sister who was trying to save the life of a woman, and what happens to her? The bishop swoops down [and] declares her excommunicated before he even looks at all the facts of the case," he says.

Oh yeah--the Bishop's office also requires that this member of a religious community be dismissed from religious life.

Anybody know how many of the hundreds of pedophile priests, or those complicit in their cover-up were actually defrocked (I'm sure there were some...but then Cardinal Law was elevated to a high position at the Vatican despite his complicity in the coverup in the Boston Archdiocese.)

But I suppose that the very best thing of all would have been to stand by and watch this mother of four die. Gather her husband and four children around her bed to say goodbye to Mommy.

What would Jesus have done?

I was so angry when I read this story that I was literally screaming in the kitchen this morning. The dogs and Walt went and hid.