From the editor’s desk

Casting stones in Brazil

Sometimes the Catholic Church is admired for its commitment to absolute moral standards; sometimes it is condemned for it. Not much admiration has come the Church's way over a case reported from Brazil. The medical team and the mother of a nine-year-old girl have been excommunicated for their part in an abortion performed on the girl, who became pregnant with twins after being repeatedly raped by her stepfather. As a nightmare scenario this would take some beating. The obvious question is whether there was any way the Church, without betraying its principles, could have displayed a little more compassion, recognising the almost impossible dilemma that both doctor and mother - not to mention the girl herself - were facing. Even to those who oppose abortion, the strict and legalistic application of church law seems to have had a cruel and indeed scandalous outcome, scandalous in the sense that it will have driven people almost instinctively to question the Church's teaching. If it has that sort of result, they will say, it cannot be right. The outcome might have been a little more acceptable had the stepfather also been excommunicated. He was not, although he is serving a jail sentence.

Sensitive to the hostile reaction both in Brazil and internationally, leaders of the Brazilian hierarchy issued a statement from Rome, where they were this week, expressing "solidarity with this girl and with all children who are victims of such a brutal act". But they insisted that "the Lord's mandate, ‘You shall not kill'", took priority. Yet had she carried the twins to full term, the girl was expected not to survive because she was too physically immature for childbirth. The excommunication was, in fact, automatic under canon law, but Archbishop José Cardoso Sobrinho of Olinda and Recife justified it on the grounds that abortion was "a silent holocaust". It is estimated that every year a million illegal abortions take place in Brazil, which permits abortion only in extreme cases, like rape. The Brazilian President Luiz Inácio da Silva said "as a Christian and a Catholic" he deeply regretted the excommunication, an opinion that seems to be widely shared in his country.

Hard cases make bad law. Such a thought may even have gone through the mind of Jesus when they brought before him a woman taken in adultery. Mosaic law required her execution by stoning; not to enforce it might be seen as condoning the sin and setting a bad example to others. In the Brazilian case, furthermore, there were two innocent foetuses, which an abortion would kill. Nevertheless, Jesus' response displayed a profound compassion that seems absent in this case. He did not condone the woman's behaviour; he told her to sin no more. But the rest of his remarks ask searching questions of the Catholic Church in Brazil and elsewhere. Down the generations, has it allowed and condoned a misogynistic attitude on the part of men that has led to the widespread sexual exploitation of girls and women and resulted in tragedies like this? Is it entirely "without sin", and should it therefore be "casting the first stone"?