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.
Arsenio Butil Jr fell to his knees and began to pray when last week’s deadly magnitude 7.8 earthquake began shaking his home on the coast of the southern Philippines. When he opened his eyes, he saw a once-familiar shoreline changing in real time, with swathes of previously submerged coral suddenly pushing above the waterline. The June 8 quake, driven by a shifting of the nearby Cotabato Trench, toppled buildings, triggered landslides and killed at least 76 people on the southern island of Mindanao. The tectonic forces at work also thrust chunks of the island’s coastline upward in a phenomenon known as “coastal uplift,”
Voters in Switzerland yesterday cast their ballots on an initiative championed by the top right-wing party to cap the Alpine country’s population at 10 million. As of press time last night, early results showed that Swiss voters were leaning against it. The populist Swiss People’s Party, which has the most seats in parliament, has stirred up and fostered anti-migration sentiment over the years, notably about an influx of workers from the neighboring EU. Critics called the bid a self-inflicted wound, saying the boom in migration over the past generation has brought foreign labor and skills to sectors such as healthcare, finance, pharmaceuticals
YUCK OR YUM? While it is difficult to sell second-hand goods that are more than seven years old in Japan, they are still popular in foreign markets, an executive said Under a scorching sun in a Bangkok suburb, a whistle blew, and shouts filled the air as dozens of shoppers rushed into a warehouse bearing the sign “Japanese Second-Hand Store.” From bags and bicycles to surfboards and suitcases, the Japanese second-hand market is booming, with quality-conscious buyers in other Asian countries increasingly tapping into the circular economy trend. “What is considered garbage for them can still be useful in Thailand,” said 36-year-old Lookpoo Sathitpanyapon, who runs an online store selling toy keychains. “That bag, that bag,” one shopper shouted while racing through the warehouse, filled with everything from colorful toys
Growing up in Tahiti, Anna-Bella Failloux saw first-hand the threat posed by mosquitoes: Nearly one-third of adults on the picturesque island once had swollen limbs from elephantiasis caused by their bites. She has since dedicated her life to studying mosquitoes and the diseases they transmit — a concern that looms ever larger as climate change expands the area where the insects roam. “You have to accept being bitten by a mosquito from time to time,” the 63-year-old entomologist at France’s Pasteur Institute said. “But we have to avoid too many people getting sick and dying from the infections,” Failloux said, as she observed
RSS