Lifesitenews has published a translation of a letter of a number of officials of the Diocese of Recife in response to the intervention of Archbishop Fisichella, President of the Pontifical Academy for Life, regarding the excommunications that were declared in their diocese.  While the entire letter is certainly worth reading (particularly due to its explanation of pastoral closeness to the girl and her family in the days leading up to the March 4th event), I will only quote part of it here for those who do not have time to read the whole letter:

The affirmation [in the article] that the fact was made public in the newspapers only because the Archbishop of Olinda and Recife rushed to declare the excommunication is false. It suffices to notice that the case was made public in Alagoinha on Wednesday, February 25; the Archbishop made his pronouncement to the press on March 3; and the abortion was performed on March 4. It would be too much to imagine that the Brazilian press, before a fact of such gravity, would have silenced during the period of six days. Therefore, the news of the pregnant girl (“Carmen”) was made public in the newspapers before the consummation of the abortion. Only after that, when asked by journalists, on March 3 (Tuesday), the Archbishop mentioned canon 1398. We are convinced that the disclosure of this therapeutic penalty (the excommunication) will do much good to many Catholics, making them avoid this grievous sin. The silence of the Church would be very prejudicial, especially considering that fifty million abortions are being performed every year around the world, and in Brazil alone one million innocent lives are ended. The silence may be interpreted as collusion or complicity. If any doctor has a “perplexed conscience” [as the article says] before performing an abortion (which seems extremely improbable to us), he should – if he is a Catholic and wishes to follow the law of God – seek a spiritual director…

The author believed he could speak about [a situation] he did not know, and, what is worse, he did not even have the trouble of first speaking to his brother in the episcopate, and, for his imprudent attitude, he is causing great scandal among the Catholic faithful in Brazil who are believing that Archbishop José Cardoso Sobrinho was rash in his pronouncements. Instead of seeking his brother in the episcopate, he chose to believe in our openly Anti-clerical press.

Senator Cossiga’s earlier open letter to the Archbishop, the whole of which may be read below, already responded in a similar vein

You have wished to join the chorus of condemnations pronounced upon the poor bishop of Recife from both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, beginning with the federal president of Brazil, President Lula, a great populist leader formed in the school of Liberation Theology.  Among the proponents of this theology was Dom Helder Camara, [former] bishop of Recife, great Christian utopianist, who did much good for the lower classes of South America, but who is also responsible, along with many others, for the great confusion that reigns in that continent, not only at the theological level, but also among simple faithful, regarding the nature and mission of the Church in the world, bringing many Catholics to respond with violence to the violence of the ruling classes and dictatorships, and objectively contributing to that spiral of violence that still lays waste to that suffering continent between dictatorships and terrorism, even “Christian” terrorism.

These statements are particularly pertinent because the Archbishop’s own intervention, which may also be read below, despite its protestations of the need to stick to the essentials, seemed to imply that Bishop Sobrinho was rash in declaring the excommunications, not taking adequate account of the very particular circumstances that, in Fisichella’s judgment, have made this declaration inopportune.

I am leaving aside right now the other shortcomings of the Archbishop’s intervention, adequately pointed out by both of these responses, in that, while the intervention repeats that abortion is an intrinsic evil, it definitely makes it seem that if a doctor is anguished enough, he is sometimes right in choosing it.  Indeed, the closing of the Archbishop’s intervention is hard to interpret in a way that indicates that the Archbishop really believes his own words on the intrinsic evil of abortion.  This made for sensational headlines in the secular media.  But if, abstracting from this, we pretend that the intervention was just on the innopportuneness, based on the circumstances, of declaring the excommunications, we now have two responses to the Archbishop’s letter that suggest that maybe he was the one not taking the circumstances into account.

Sometimes in public actions, the circumstances also include the possible good done to the community, and not just the individuals in question.  This is part of the notion of the remedial aspect of justice (See Summa Theologiae, I-II, q. 87, a. 3, reply to the second).  And while this could be reprehensible if concern for the individual were completely steamrolled, such was certainly not the case in the Brazilian event.   On the contrary, the pastoral attention to the girl and her family was quite extraordinary, as the letter of the Diocesan officials recounts.

But then, of course, there is the question of the global scandal, aggravated mostly, I think, by the fact that there is no canonical penalty for the girl’s nefarious stepfather.  That brings us into the whole moral discourse on scandal given, scandal taken, etc.  That will have to be the subject of a future post.  For now, suffice it to say that I think we better get used to the fact that the Brave New World is going to be scandalized by the Catholic Church quite often, even when Her pastors are not at fault.