Letters Extra

In addition to the letters published in this week’s issue of the The Tablet you can find more correspondence here, available free.

Abortion and excommunication

The three articles on the tragic case of Sister Margaret McBride's involvement in the recent abortion controversy (The Tablet, 5,June) must  encourage  all who have been left puzzled.  And encouragement must often suffice where enlightenment cannot be had, since in the Church we see only as through a glass, darkly. 

I wonder, however, if one further consideration could be explored.  Has sufficient thought been given to the possible role of the foetus as an unjust aggressor?  The existence of a negative reply from a Roman dicastery is not proof that it has.

 Is a victim  allowed to  take the life of an aggressor in order to save his or her own life, even if the agressor had not formed, or had been unable to form, an aggressive intent?  If so, would not a foetus whose objective aggression was threatening the mother's life, be in the same moral/legal position as an unwitting aggressor , or an aggressive child or mentally defective adult?

Commenting on the Bishop of Phoenix’s pronouncement of formal excommunication of Sr Margaret McBride for her authorising an abortion (Letters, 5 June), D. P. Gleeson challenges the Church’s claim to have authority to excommunicate. He/she fails to note that Christ the Lord laid down a procedure for excommunicating, as recorded in Matthew 18:15-18. Therein he says that after the wayward one has been warned twice and has not listened to the Church, “ let him be to you like a Gentile or tax collector.” St Paul teaches much the same in I Corinthians 5:1-5, 2 Thessalonians 3:6-15, and we find it in Second Letter of John 2:10.

Canon law on excommunication does not involve “expulsion from the Christian communion”. Sr McBride remains a member of the Catholic Church who is invited to repentance and absolution. Seeing she is a lay person, she suffers scarcely any penalty except that she is forbidden to receive Communion.

As a canonist I was taken aback by Bishop Olmstead’s declaration of a latae sententiae excommunication in the case of Sr Margaret Mary McBride. The immorality of Sr McBride’s action in giving advice that the termination of the pregnancy is at very least open to question, as Charles Curran (5 June) indicates. But I would argue on more narrowly canonical grounds that Bishop Olmstead’s declaration of a latae sententiae penalty is unjustified.
Canon 1329§2 deals with accomplices in a delict, and imposes a latae sententiae penalty only on those without whose cooperation the relevant offence would not have been committed. Laws imposing penalties must be interpreted strictly (canon 18). It seems to me that in the strict sense Sr McBride’s ethical advice was not indispensable to the termination of pregnancy.

Even if this argument were to be rejected, there would remain the even more significant list of factors that in effect excuse from a latae sententiae penalty. These are enumerated in canon 1324, and include motivation from necessity or even grave incommodum – which is a bit more than “serious inconvenience”, but still a rubric under which saving a human life would surely fall. Even if one erroneously believes that such a factor is present, it is enough to excuse from the penalty. Canon 1324§1 ends with the more general statement that one who acts without full imputability, even where the imputability remains grave, is not bound by a latae sententiae penalty (cf. canon 1324§3). Given that we are dealing with a disputed moral question, and that Sr McBride was surely motivated by the desire to save a woman’s life, her imputability surely falls short of being “full”.

Whether Sr McBride acted rightly is perhaps open to argument, but it is a huge canonical step from a wrong action to an offence meriting excommunication.

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