More Craziness in Arizona
The bishop of Phoenix is, apparently, a heart and mind stunted and disconnected to a degree unusual even among his ecclesiastical peers, but curiously in tune with his geographical region.
As Nicholas Kristof writes in his NYT column today, and as I heard on NPR last week but found too upsetting to mention then, Sister Margaret McBride of St. Joseph's Hospital was excommunicated for approving, to save the life of a a 27-year-old who had developed pulmonary hypertension in the eleventh week of her fifth pregnancy, an abortion. The woman lived.
Excommunication. The most hideous, severe, last-ditch discipline.
As Kristof puts it, "Sister Margaret made a difficult judgment in an emergency, saved a life and then was punished and humiliated by a lightning bolt from a bishop who spent 16 years living in Rome..."
I'm making this post public to help publicize the incident, not because I want to debate it or the whole library of issues that converge in it. I don't. I know the painfully obvious, and obviously painful, as well as you do: that this level of discipline is conspicuously incongruous with that meted out to certain criminals who committed child abuse, that the hierarchy is largely staffed by men with huge issues with women, and of course that abortion is what it is. I'm already hurting; there's no need to kick me again.
The Church is that woman and her family and doctors and Sister Margaret ... and also the bishop. Not, for goodness sake, the bishop alone, nor even pre-eminently.
As Nicholas Kristof writes in his NYT column today, and as I heard on NPR last week but found too upsetting to mention then, Sister Margaret McBride of St. Joseph's Hospital was excommunicated for approving, to save the life of a a 27-year-old who had developed pulmonary hypertension in the eleventh week of her fifth pregnancy, an abortion. The woman lived.
Excommunication. The most hideous, severe, last-ditch discipline.
As Kristof puts it, "Sister Margaret made a difficult judgment in an emergency, saved a life and then was punished and humiliated by a lightning bolt from a bishop who spent 16 years living in Rome..."
I'm making this post public to help publicize the incident, not because I want to debate it or the whole library of issues that converge in it. I don't. I know the painfully obvious, and obviously painful, as well as you do: that this level of discipline is conspicuously incongruous with that meted out to certain criminals who committed child abuse, that the hierarchy is largely staffed by men with huge issues with women, and of course that abortion is what it is. I'm already hurting; there's no need to kick me again.
The Church is that woman and her family and doctors and Sister Margaret ... and also the bishop. Not, for goodness sake, the bishop alone, nor even pre-eminently.