This cartoon is dedicated to the brave, wise and compassionate Sister Margaret McBride. Personally, I think the church did her a favor by excommunicating her!
So, the Catholic Church would have preferred two deaths to one, orphaned four children and widowed one husband. Their position is indefensible.
Last November, a 27-year-old woman was admitted to St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center in Phoenix. She was 11 weeks pregnant with her fifth child. She was gravely ill. According to a hospital document, she had “right heart failure,” and her doctors told her that if she continued with the pregnancy, her risk of mortality was “close to 100 percent.” ?The patient, who was too ill to be moved to the operating room much less another hospital, agreed to an abortion. But there was a complication: She was at a Catholic hospital.?But the hospital felt it could proceed because of an exception called Directive 47 in the U.S. Catholic Church’s ethical guidelines for health care providers that allows, in some circumstance, procedures that could kill the fetus to save the mother. Sister Margaret McBride (order: Sisters of Mercy), who was an administrator at the hospital as well as its liaison to the diocese, gave her approval. ?The woman survived. When Bishop Thomas J. Olmsted heard about the abortion, he declared that McBride was automatically excommunicated, the most serious penalty the church can levy.?This is certainly strange seeing as how in recent months and years no pedophile priests have been excommunicated. When priests have been caught their bishops have protected them, and it has taken years or decades to defrock them, if ever. In fact, those priests were simply sent to other parishes to abuse and destroy the lives of other unsuspecting children. Yet here we have a sister who was trying to save the life of a woman, and what happens to her? The bishop swoops down and declares her excommunicated before he even looks at all the facts of the case.