Forgive the Rapists but Send the Suffering Children to Hell
In a recent New York Times article, it was reported that a 9-year-old girl in Alagoinha, Brazil was raped by her step-father. Though horrific in and of itself, what happened next was even more shocking:
The 9-year-old girl underwent an abortion when she was 15 weeks pregnant at one of the 55 centers authorized to perform the procedure in Brazil. Abortion is legal here only in cases of rape or when the mother’s life is at risk. The doctors’ actions set off a swirl of controversy. A Brazilian archbishop summarily excommunicated everyone involved – the doctors for performing the abortion and the girl’s mother for allowing it – except for the stepfather, who stands accused of raping the girl over a number of years. “The law of God is above any human law,” said José Cardoso Sobrinho, the archbishop, who argued that while rape was bad, abortion was even worse.
Really.
Apparently the Catholic Church is only concerned with children up to the age of, say, conception. Screw the nine years olds, literally. On their website, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops notes that “since that time [the 19th century], science has only further confirmed the humanity of the child growing in the womb. Official Church teaching insists, to the present day, that a just society protects life before as well as after birth. ”
Herein lies the flaw in the ointment: the “life at conception” fallacy. While one could debate this question ad nauseam, the duplicity of church doctrine is a necessary evil that arises out of the need for a coalescing cause around which the church can unite is faithful. Abortion is the 21st century equivalent of the witches of Salem, the heretic visionaries (think Joan of Arc) and others who both posed a threat to conventional church power and presented an opportunity for rallying the Christian soldiers to the cause of Catholicism.
It’s worth noting that in his June 29, 1995 Letter to Women, the Pope noted that “women’s dignity has often been unacknowledged and . . . they have often been relegated to the margins of society and even reduced to servitude”. He wrote, “The time has come to condemn vigorously the types of sexual violence which frequently have women for their object and to pass laws which effectively defend them from such violence”
As we have seen in Brazil, this notion of extending dignity to women and children and opposing sexual violence against them plays second fiddle to the realities of an antiquated religious dogma seated in the male psyche. Archbishop Sobrinho tells us it is God’s law so it must be so.
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