A senior Vatican official has criticized the excommunication of the mother of a Brazilian girl, who had an abortion after being raped, as well as the medical team who performed it.
“Before thinking about an excommunication it was necessary and urgent to save the innocent life [of the nine-year-old girl] to bring her back to a level of humanity of which clerics should be the experts and master,” said Rino Fisichella, president of the Pontifical Academy for Life.
“This was not the case,” Fisichella said in an article to be published by the Vatican’s Osservatore Romano newspaper yesterday. “Unfortunately the credibility of our teaching took a blow as it appeared, in the eyes of many, to be insensitive, incomprehensible and lacking mercy.”
The Academy for Life is tasked with promoting the Roman Catholic Church doctrine on bioethics.
Brazilian bishops said on Thursday the excommunication of the mother and doctors of the nine-year-old, who was pregnant with twins and allegedly raped by her stepfather, was wrong and would not be applied.
The National Conference of Bishops of Brazil decided that the child’s mother acted “under pressure from the doctors” who said the girl would die if she carried the babies to term.
Dimas Lara Barbosa, the body’s secretary-general, told reporters the mother therefore could not be excommunicated.
“We must take the circumstances into consideration,” he said.
As for the doctors, there was no clear case that they should be expelled from the Church either, he said contrary to the position taken by Archbishop Jose Cardoso Sobrinho, who last week announced the excommunications.
The images of a besuited Ferdinand Marcos Jr, clad in a top hat and leaning nonchalantly on a Rolls-Royce, dating from his time in Britain in the 1970s, are as you might expect from the playboy scion of a kleptocratic dictator. Yet as the Marcos family returns to power in the Philippines after a landslide presidential victory by Marcos Jr, he is facing calls to stop misrepresenting the circumstances of his studies at the University of Oxford. The university has confirmed that he did not complete his degree in philosophy, politics and economics after enrolling in 1975. “According to our records, he did
HATE CRIME: Officials were investigating a detailed ‘manifesto’ posted online before the livestreamed shooting, in which the suspect outlined his reasoning and plans A heavily armed 18-year-old white man on Saturday shot 10 people dead at a Buffalo, New York, grocery store in a “racially motivated” attack that he livestreamed on camera, authorities said. The gunman, who was wearing body armor and a helmet, was arrested after the massacre, Buffalo Police Commissioner Joseph Gramaglia told a news conference. Gramaglia put the toll at 10 dead and three wounded. Eleven of the victims were African Americans. The gunman shot four people in the parking lot of the Tops supermarket, three of them fatally, then went inside and continued firing, Gramaglia said. Among those killed inside the store was
CALIBRATED RESPONSE: The city-state has learned from its past experiences of dealing with COVID-19 variants to assess the situation and the risks, the transport minister said Singapore will strive to keep its borders open and stay connected to the rest of world even if a new variant of COVID-19 emerges, Singaporean Minister for Transport S. Iswaran said on Wednesday. The city-state has learned from its past experiences of dealing with COVID-19 variants, Iswaran said in an interview with Bloomberg News. When the Omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2 hit, Singapore did not backtrack on its reopening plans, but rather decided to wait and see how things panned out, he said, adding that the response was different versus the Delta outbreak. “We’ve all learned to adapt,” Iswaran said on the sidelines
Administrators at an elite Beijing university have backed down from plans to further tighten restrictions on students as part of China’s “zero COVID-19” strategy after a weekend protest at the school, students said on Tuesday. Graduate students at Peking University staged the protest on Sunday over the school’s decision to erect a sheet-metal wall to keep them further sequestered on campus, while allowing faculty to come and go freely. Discontent had already been simmering over regulations prohibiting them from ordering in food or having visitors, and daily COVID-19 testing. A citywide lockdown of Shanghai and expanded restrictions in Beijing in the past few
RSS