To the credit of many Catholics not wearing a bishop’s robes, the
backlash against the actions of Sobrinho and Battista Re has been
intense. It continued Sunday with an unusual rebuke from Archbishop
Rino Fischiella, head of Vatican’s Pontifical Academy for Life, who
called out his two fellow bishops for their actions. Fischiella wrote
in the Vatican newspaper that the girl “should have been above all
defended, embraced, treated with sweetness to make her feel that we
were all on her side, all of us, without distinction.”
Excommunicating those who tried to help her “unfortunately hurts the
credibility of our teaching, which appears in the eyes of many as
insensitive, incomprehensible and lacking mercy.”
It’s a fairer statement than that of his fellow archbishops, but
still short-sighted and narcissistic. In the eyes of many, it is that
concern for the church – the at-risk “the credibility of our teaching”
– above the concerns of its faithful is the very moral incoherence that
has led to a decline in the church’s influence in the past decade.
Far more at risk than the credibility of the church’s teaching or
the integrity of its laws is the faith of those who look to the
church’s treatment of a 9-year-old girl and her protectors and see,
instead of the mercy preached by the church’s founder, only the cruelty
of ordinary men.
A.