"Two Innocent Persons"

Verily, the Vatican outdoeth itself, in its sincere concern for the sanctity of human life. Its faithful hear and they obey. Alternatively, they open their ears, receive the wisdom of their sages with open scorn, and choose to disobey. The simple fact being that sometimes simple folk have the deep concerns and the depth of response that somehow seem to elude God's Shepherd.

In assessing a situation where a psychopathic personality found satisfaction in repeatedly raping a child of six, until she reached the rare ripe age of nine, at which signal hormonal time in her personal history she conceived, and innocently unaware she was carrying twin foetuses, complained of pains in her stomach.

The public in Brazil, and doubtless world-wide, stands in staunch support of a mother's decision to deliver her child from pain and certain death.

That, somehow, it escaped the mother's attention that her young child was being repeatedly sexually molested, and that her fourteen-year-old disabled girl was also being molested by the man whom the mother introduced into the household as her husband, certainly is a shame of unbridled proportion.

Stranger things, doubtless, have happened. Women have a propensity to allow their vision to be clouded when they love.

First love, however, is owed to one's children. To cherish, support and encourage their human needs, to keep them from harm as much as humanly possible. This is a parent's guiding principle to be adhered to above all other concerns. Failure to protect one's children, and to see them through crises is an abomination of lost character and collapsed humanity.

Ah, but the Vatican's Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, head of the Roman Catholic Church's Congregation for Bishops, feels otherwise, and takes issue with that simple issue. For him, the issue is directly supportive of the excommunication of the child's mother, and her doctors who performed the abortion. Under Brazil law an abortion may be occasioned, as a result of rape or threat of death to the mother.

Under Vatican law, there is no reason, ever, to conduct an abortion, for it is, quite clearly, murder. Two four-month foetuses, according to Cardinal Batista Re, represent 'twins' who 'had a right to live'. "It is a sad case, but the real problem is that the twins conceived were two innocent persons, who had the right to live and could not be eliminated", he pronounced turgidly.

The real problem, in the real world, viewed by real people, is that a girl child has the right to be a child, not an object of sexual gratification for a conscienceless male who violated her rights as a child.

The real problem is that when responsible and caring professionals in a country as rigidly Catholic as Brazil take the initiative to relieve the child from the burden of pregnancy, and restore her right to live, it is condemned by the Church.

But Cardinal Batista Re doesn't just end the matter there. He is also in firm support of penalizing the child's mother and her doctors: "Excommunication for those who carried out the abortion is just", for the termination of a pregnancy is distinctly equated with murder; ceasing the potential for life through interrupting a biological process overseen by God.

The country's Minister of Health, Jose Gomes Temporao, found himself in unfortunate disagreement with his country's archbishop, Jose Cardoso Sobrinho: "Two things strike me; the assault on the girl and the position of this bishop, which is truly lamentable". To that, amen.

But not so fast: According to Cardinal Battista Re, additionally head of the Pontifical Commission for Latin America: "Life must always be protected. The attack on the Brazilian Church is unjustified."

Depends on whose life; certainly not the life of a violated child. Eminently justified, the criticism of the Roman Catholic Church; in Brazil and within the Vatican.