Vatican’s credibility ‘damaged’ by row over rape victim aged 9

Jyeshtha Shuddha Dwitiya

A senior archbishop has said the Vatican was wrong to condemn two doctors who carried out an abortion on a nine-year-old girl who fell pregnant after being raped.

He admitted the Church’s "credibility" had been hurt by the bitter row over the termination in Brazil, a month after the rehabilitation of a Holocaust-denying British Catholic bishop raised questions about the Pope’s judgment.

In the second public relations controversy to hit the Catholic Church in weeks, the Pope’s advisers appeared to be at loggerheads over the excommunication of medics who performed an abortion on Brazilian girl made pregnant with twins by her stepfather.

The girl’s mother was also excommunicated for authorising the termination of the pregnancy, which was discovered when the girl complained of stomach pains and told officials she had been abused since the age of six.

Archbishop Rino Fisichella, who heads the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy for Life, criticised the move and said the Church should have showed a greater sense of mercy to the child.

While upholding the Church’s implacable opposition to abortion, he said the decision to excommunicate the doctors, taken by a Brazilian archbishop, "hurts the credibility of our teaching, which appears in the eyes of many as insensitive, incomprehensible and lacking mercy".

The doctors did not deserve to be excommunicated for the "arduous decision" they had made to perform the abortion, because the girl’s life would have been in danger if the pregnancy had continued, he said.

Archbishop Fisichella’s opinion, carried prominently in the Vatican’s semi-official newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, put him at odds with another highly ranked Vatican official.

Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, the head of the Congregation for Bishops, has insisted that the twins should have been allowed to live and that the attacks on the Brazilian archbishop who announced the excommunications were "unjustified".

"It is a sad case but the real problem is that the twins conceived were two innocent persons, who had the right to live and could not be eliminated," he said. "Life must always be protected."

The row over the girl’s abortion, which was carried out last week, has stretched from the corridors of the Vatican to the streets of Brazil, where it prompted a huge public debate over the Church’s lack of compassion.

In response to public anger, Brazilian bishops last week said that the excommunications were wrong and would not be applied.

The split within the Vatican comes a few days after the Pope released an unusually candid letter in which he admitted that mistakes were made over the decision to rehabilitate Richard Williamson, a maverick British bishop who questioned the Holocaust.

Source: Telegraph

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