Outchurched

Yeah, that’s the harshest post title on Outchurched to date, but it’s also an accurate assesment of this story:

Church Condemns Abortion Performed on Raped Girl, 11

A Vatican official has said the Catholic church will excommunicate a medical team who performed Colombia’s first legal abortion on an 11-year-old girl, who was eight weeks pregnant after being raped by her stepfather.

Cardinal Alfonso Lopez Trujillo, the president of the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for the Family, said in addition to the doctors and nurses, the measure could apply to “relatives, politicians and lawmakers” whom he called “protagonists in this abominable crime”.

So, in essence, the Catholic church is saying that it’s moral/right for Catholics to force an 11-year-old who was sexually abused/molested over a period of four years to have to deal with her undesired and unprovoked pregnancy, and that medical professionals should be punished (ecclesiastically, socially, politically) for the “abominable crime” of doing their jobs. It appears that the Vatican’s policy for Good God-Fearing Catholics is to punish the victim for being victimized and to embrace pedophiles and child molesters.

In May Colombia’s constitutional court partially lifted the ban on abortion in this deeply Catholic country, allowing pregnancies to be terminated in cases of severe deformity of the foetus, when the pregnancy is the result of rape or incest, or when the mother’s life is in danger.

The first test of the ruling came when the girl sought to terminate her pregnancy, which followed her being raped by her stepfather. The man admitted to the abuse, which began when the child was seven.

When the case became public, doctors were wary of performing the abortion as the text of the court’s ruling has yet to be published and they feared prosecution. But the high court issued a new ruling, compelling doctors to abide by its decision if the woman’s case fell within the criteria. … Carlos Lemus, the director of Simon Bolivar hospital where the abortion was performed … said Cardinal Trujillo “calls the doctors and nurses ‘evildoers’. I think the person who raped her is the evildoer”.

A senator, Gina Parody, said: “The Vatican has the right to excommunicate whomever they choose. But I would hope that they also excommunicate priests when they rape boys or girls.”

Ms. Parody is correct, the Catholic church does have the right to excommunicate anyone they wish. I’d think that this type of statement from the Vatican would make me want to excommunicate myself, were I Catholic.

Perhaps we should be grateful for such a clear and obvious example of Religious Ignorance and the pragmatic effects of Dominionism. Dominionism and the movement towards Theocracy (although it’ll likely be mislabelled as “Democracy” in the US and elsewhere) is a growing threat, one that’s very real, and one that’s very serious. Now is the time for Believers (Catholic, Protestants, etc.) to wake up, read up, and most importantly, non-violently stand up and take action.

The enemy is not the misguided fools who blindly follow the lead of the Vatican (or their denomination), but their ignorance and ideology… both of which can be overcome.

What a dark day for Catholicism.

This entry was posted by Rev. Dan on Thursday, August 31st, 2006 at 3:38 pm and is filed under Dominionism, Christlikeness?. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.