What? A Vatican prelate with decency?

A while back I commented on the poor 9-year-old Brazilian girl who had to undergo an abortion after bring raped by her stepfather landed her with twins. The abortion was only legal because the doctors agreed the pregnancy, should it continue, would pose a critical risk to the young girl's life. For this, her mother and the doctors participating in the abortion were quickly excommunicated by the Vatican (that's a bad thing now ...?), conforming to its ridiculous pro-life doctrine.

However, now, an important prelate to the Vatican is speaking out against this excommunication of the mother and doctors, saying that while abortion is always bad, they should've pondered the matter a little more to have avoided looking like insensitive bastards.

The statement by Archbishop Rino Fisichella in the Vatican newspaper Sunday was highly unusual because church law mandates automatic excommunication for abortion. Fisichella, who heads the Vatican's Pontifical Academy for Life, also upheld the church's ban on abortion and any implications of his criticism of excommunicating the doctors and the girl's mother weren't clear.

Fisichella argued for a sense of "mercy" in such cases and respect for the Catholic doctors' wrenching decision, and strongly criticized fellow churchmen who singled out the doctors and mother for public condemnation.

This guy seems to be at a fundamentally impossible moral crossroads here. On one side, he's part of the bloody Vatican, which automatically dictates he'll be completely against abortion in any way, shape or form, but on the other hand, here he is, denouncing their knee-jerk excommunication as 'insensitive' and such. At least he's one of the rare ones with a shred of decency and humanity left in him, but frankly, there isn't much he can do about it, is there?

This next paragraph made me choke.

"Before thinking about excommunication, it was necessary and urgent to save her innocent life and bring her back to a level of humanity of which we men of the church should be expert and masters in proclaiming," Fisichella wrote.

[My emphasis]

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*Moving on ...*

But Fisichella criticized the archbishop's public denunciation, writing that the girl "should have been above all defended, embraced, treated with sweetness to make her feel that we were all on her side, all of us, without distinction."

Fisichella stressed that abortion is always "bad." But he said the quick proclamation of excommunication "unfortunately hurts the credibility of our teaching, which appears in the eyes of many as insensitive, incomprehensible and lacking mercy."

Sorry, Mr. Fisichella ... but that is what your group is – 'insensitive, incomprehensible and lacking mercy'. There is nothing bad, whatsoever, with abortion when it is carried out to save the mother's life. If saving lives, which are all sacred to you after all, is your utmost priority as you say it is, then why would you want the little girl here to pursue the pregnancy if it would likely kill her or cause her intense, perhaps irreversible, damage to her physical or mental well-being.

But then, never argue with religious people unless you want to be sucked into a tunnel of irrationality, illogicality and ignorance.