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.
Malaysia yesterday installed a motorcycle-riding billionaire sultan as its new king in lavish ceremonies for a post seen as a ballast in times of political crises. The coronation ceremony for Malaysia’s King Sultan Ibrahim, 65, at the National Palace in Kuala Lumpur followed his oath-taking in January as the country’s 17th monarch. Malaysia is a constitutional monarchy, with a unique arrangement that sees the throne change hands every five years between the rulers of nine Malaysian states headed by centuries-old Islamic royalty. While chiefly ceremonial, the position of king has in the past few years played an increasingly important role. Royal intervention was
X-37B COMPARISON: China’s spaceplane is most likely testing technology, much like US’ vehicle, said Victoria Samson, an official at the Secure World Foundation China’s shadowy, uncrewed reusable spacecraft, which launches atop a rocket booster and lands at a secretive military airfield, is most likely testing technology, but could also be used for manipulating or retrieving satellites, experts said. The spacecraft, on its third mission, was last month observed releasing an object, moving several kilometers away and then maneuvering back to within a few hundred meters of it. “It’s obvious that it has a military application, including, for example, closely inspecting objects of the enemy or disabling them, but it also has non-military applications,” said Marco Langbroek, a lecturer in optical space situational awareness at Delft
The Philippine Air Force must ramp up pilot training if it is to buy 20 or more multirole fighter jets as it modernizes and expands joint operations with its navy, a commander said yesterday. A day earlier US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said that the US “will do what is necessary” to see that the Philippines is able to resupply a ship on the Second Thomas Shoal (Renai Shoal, 仁愛暗沙) that Manila uses to reinforce its claims to the atoll. Sullivan said the US would prefer that the Philippines conducts the resupplies of the small crew on the warship Sierra Madre,
AIRLINES RECOVERING: Two-thirds of the flights canceled on Saturday due to the faulty CrowdStrike update that hit 8.5 million devices worldwide occurred in the US As the world continues to recover from massive business and travel disruptions caused by a faulty software update from cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, malicious actors are trying to exploit the situation for their own gain. Government cybersecurity agencies across the globe and CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz are warning businesses and individuals around the world about new phishing schemes that involve malicious actors posing as CrowdStrike employees or other tech specialists offering to assist those recovering from the outage. “We know that adversaries and bad actors will try to exploit events like this,” Kurtz said in a statement. “I encourage everyone to remain vigilant