http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/americas/03/11/brazil.rape.abortion/
Jose Cardoso Sobrinho, Archbishop of the Brazilian city of Recife, has almost inspired me to cast my cherished atheism aside and set up the Coventry branch of the Orange Order. Unfortunately, due to the economic downturn, I can’t even find enough apprentice boys to intimidate the local Hare Krishnas.
A nine-year old girl repeatedly raped and finally impregnated by her stepfather was shown grace and mercy passing all understanding. The girl’s mother, doctors and others involved in the decision to terminate the pregnancy - rather than forcing the child to risk her own life to give birth to her rapist’s offspring - are to be excommunicated.
Can anyone explain this to me? Can anyone convince me there’s reason and virtue in this act rather than a devotion to medieval dogma so unflinching, unthinking and unfeeling that it’s plain psychotic? I fear this question isn’t rhetorical enough. Anyone who’s read more than one book on a given subject or been on the receiving end of a poor decision at court knows that truth isn’t absolute and an artfully constructed argument is the best substitute we’re likely to get for it. Besides, religious thinkers have had a couple of millennia to get their ducks in a row and simple logic will always be trumped by the hallowed utterances of dead zealots, ex-Nazis and blind faith.
I would genuinely like to be enlightened on the Catholic Church’s system of moral triage. Why, for example, is life in embryo or in terminal agony so much more precious than at any other stage? Why aren’t paramilitary murderers and genocidal dictators routinely excommunicated? Come to think of it, why wasn’t the rapist step-father who conceived this debacle cast from God’s mercy? Could the reason be institutional misogyny?
To give him his due, the Archbishop did try to explain. “A graver act than rape is abortion,” he told the press, and the girl herself wasn’t excommunicated because. “the Church is benevolent when it comes to minors.” More tea, vicar?
This may seem an exercise in Catholic-bashing, and if it causes any believer who gets this far some offence, that wasn’t my point but I don’t mind at all. Plainly, Catholicism doesn’t have a monopoly on lunatic beliefs but its inability to drag itself into the second millennium makes it such an easy target.
Admittedly, secular despots are just as capable of wickedness and merely hijack a desperate human need to kowtow to anything capable of making messianic noises. Far from being arch-atheists, the likes of Stalin and Pol Pot amply illustrate the danger of religious instinct. Far from dispensing with religion, they simply replaced the established version with one of their own making which was no less dependent on fear and unthinking obedience to dogma. I digress.
Perhaps I’m missing the point and easy certainty makes for a more comfortable existence than cold reason. Perhaps I’d need years in a seminary to understand the sacred mysteries well enough to want to cast decent people into the outer darkness, to condemn their immortal souls to endless suffering, for saving the life of an abused child. I’m still genuinely curious though. Can anyone explain Archbishop Sobrinho’s actions? Anyone?
