For the holidays this year, the Catholic Church chose to give the
world the gift of bizarre, alienating and utterly missing the point
rhetoric.
Oh, you shouldn’t have!
We already got one of those from the NRA!
First, Pope Benedict used his annual holiday message to the Vatican to denounce gay and lesbian progress as a “manipulation of nature” and an “attack”
on the family.
Now, Cardinal Sean Brady, the Primate of all Ireland,
has used the galvanizing death of a pregnant woman in a Galway hospital
as an excuse to double down on anti-abortion rhetoric.
Guys, maybe next year you could ask Santa for a sense of timing and a pair of ears that aren’t tone-deaf.
The harrowing, cruel experience of Savita Halappanavar,
who died of septicaemia in October, has provoked unprecedented national
outrage. Her widower alleges her doctors wouldn’t intervene to save her
life while her fetus still had a heartbeat, on the excuse that “This is
a Catholic country.”
Now, following a wave of public protests and an
advisory from the European Court of Human Rights, Ireland, the only
European union nation that still outlaws abortion, has begun the
delicate process of loosening its restrictions.
Earlier this month,
Minister of Health James Reilly announced the government is introducing
new laws that will permit abortion when the life of the mother is at
risk.
The new regulations will still be plenty restrictive – a mere risk
to the mother’s health will still not be sufficient to obtain an
abortion, and Reilly assures that the changes will “clarify
what is legal for the professionals who must provide care while at all
times taking full account of the equal right to life of the unborn
child.”
Yet
at a moment when a minute move toward preventing more women from dying
in agony is finally on the table, Brady took the opportunity to deliver a
Christmas message about “life” to the people of Ireland, urging, “No government has the right to remove that right from an innocent person.”
In case you’re wondering, it’s not the innocent life of Savita Halappanavar he’s referencing here.
Nobody
expects the Catholic Church to do a sudden, swift about-face on the
topic of abortion.
But instead of trying to whip up the masses with some
phony-baloney rhetoric about honoring life, Brady — or any other Irish
priest with an ounce of true courage – could have spoken out with
compassion about a tragic loss. He could have extended condolences to
her family.
He could have mentioned that while the Church opposes
abortion even to save the life of a mother – Pope Pius XI famously,
chillingly declared that “However we may pity the mother whose health
and even life is imperiled by the performance of her natural duty, there
yet remains no sufficient reason for condoning the direct murder of the
innocent” — it does however clearly insist “physicians must do
everything in their power to save both the mother and the child.” In
other words, you can’t just sit back and let a woman die.
In fact,
even if you’re sticking strictly with the letter of Catholic law,
doctors are permitted to intervene to save a mother in any ways that
aren’t what is known in the Catechism of the Catholic church as “direct
abortion.”
If a fetus doesn’t survive as a result of a necessary procedure
– for instance a lifesaving removal of a fallopian tube – that’s not
contrary to doctrine.
That’s why, even while the investigation into the
death of Halappanavar is still going on, it’s really not difficult to
imagine, in a country that valued women’s lives at least as much as it
values fetuses, a situation where doctors could in good conscience have
done a whole lot more to save her, even while allowing for the
possibility that their actions might result in the loss of the baby.
So why aren’t the likes of Brady talking about that?
Why, as their nation is inching slowing toward an acknowledgment that
it’s pretty much the opposite of respecting life to let women suffer and
die over a non-viable pregnancy, why isn’t Catholic leadership speaking
out with, at the barest minimum, a clarification of existing doctrine?
A
reminder that doctors have an obligation not just toward fetuses but
mothers?
A message of respect toward women? Instead, Brady, in his
willful, insulting abuse of a holiday message, told his flock that
“Public representatives will be asked to decide whether a caring and
compassionate society is defined by providing the best possible care and
protection to a woman struggling to cope with an unwanted pregnancy or
by the deliberate destruction of another human life.”
In a speech
about life, he cravenly didn’t mention Halappanavar’s name.
In a message
of compassion, he ignored the lack of compassion that lead to an
avoidable death.
Instead he said, “I hope that everyone who believes
that the right to life is fundamental will make their voice heard in a
reasonable, but forthright, way to their representatives.”
I hope so
too.
And I hope when they do, the remember the name of Savita
Halappanavar.
