Holy Disgusting

For years, the Catholic Church has been trying to put the horrors of the sexual abuse scandals behind them and bring the Church into something resembling the present.

And then they blow themselves all the way back to the Middle Ages.

A man from Brazil, who had been raping his two stepdaughters for years, was arrested after it was discovered that one of them was four months pregnant.

She is nine years old. Her sister, who is "only" fourteen, is physically handicapped.

Brazil has some of the world's most restrictive abortion laws, barring the procedure in all cases except those involving rape and danger to the mother's life. With both conditions having been met in spades, the procedure was performed and the the girl's life was saved. The stepfather is now in jail where he belongs, and I for one hope he never gets out.

And then Archbishop Jose Cardoso Sobrinho excommunicated the mother and the girl's doctors for performing the abortion, telling a Brazilian TV network that "the law of God [is] above any human law." Attempting to show that he is not a complete jerk, the archbishop graciously did not excommunicate the rape victim herself.

With Brazilian president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva condemning the Church's outrageous take on the tragedy, it was noticed that the stepfather was not excommunicated.

That was not an accident, Sobrinho said. "It is clear that he committed a very serious sin," he said as he defended the Church's actions, "but worse than this is the abortion."

Let me get this straight: a monster who rapes children and gets a nine-year-old girl pregnant is actually better than the girl's mother and the doctors who save her life?

According to the Vatican, yes. Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, the head of the Roman Catholic Church's Congregation for Bishops, weighed in over the weekend. "It is a sad case," he told the Italian newspaper La Stampa, "but the real problem is that the twins conceived were two innocent persons, who had the right to live and could not be eliminated."

And the Church hierarchy wonders why Catholics are leaving in droves. It's only a matter of time before the Church's medieval outlook on life ensnares them as well.