Leave that forgiveness crap for Jeebus

The Catholic Church will have nothing of it.

From NPR today:

Last November, a 27-year-old woman was admitted to St. Joseph's Hospital and Medical Center in Phoenix. She was 11 weeks pregnant with her fifth child, and she was gravely ill. According to a hospital document, she had "right heart failure," and her doctors told her that if she continued with the pregnancy, her risk of mortality was "close to 100 percent."

The patient, who was too ill to be moved to the operating room much less another hospital, agreed to an abortion. But there was a complication: She was at a Catholic hospital.

"They were in quite a dilemma," says Lisa Sowle Cahill, who teaches Catholic theology at Boston College. "There was no good way out of it. The official church position would mandate that the correct solution would be to let both the mother and the child die. I think in the practical situation that would be a very hard choice to make."

But the hospital felt it could proceed because of an exception — called Directive 47 in the U.S. Catholic Church's ethical guidelines for health care providers — that allows, in some circumstance, procedures that could kill the fetus to save the mother. Sister Margaret McBride, who was an administrator at the hospital as well as its liaison to the diocese, gave her approval.

The woman survived. When Bishop Thomas J. Olmsted heard about the abortion, he declared that McBride was automatically excommunicated — the most serious penalty the church can levy.

The story goes on to rightly mention "When priests have been caught..." sexually molesting and/or physically abusing children... "their bishops have protected them, and it has taken years or decades to defrock them, if ever."

But one nun, saving the life of one mother, with an abortion?

Fugghedaboudit, you'reouttaheah...

Apparently her problems would be solved and she wouldn't have been excommunicated if only she had a penis, poor thing.

Just don't think it's not still a man's world.

Link to original post:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=126985072&ft=1&f=1001