Adventures in Catholic Morality – Nun Excommunicated for saving a life whilst Paedophile Priests are shielded from justice.

May 4, 2012

I was reminded of this slide which I’d come up with a while back when in the last week I helped organise a Counter-demonstration to defend reproductive rights in response to a nationwide series of anti-choice ‘kerbside vigils’ organised by SPUC the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children. SPUC is supposedly a secular group but is utterly dominated by the Catholic Church which is whilst being a supposedly anti-abortion group it campaigns against condoms and gay marriage.

Then just a few days later came the news that Cardinal Brady the head of the Catholic Church in Ireland was refusing to resign after a BBC investigation revealed that in 1975 Brady, then a lowly priest, was sent by his Bishop to investigate allegations of sexual abuse by paedophile priest the Reverend Brendan Smyth. Brady interviewed Brendan Boland who was the first of Reverend Smyth’s many victims to appeal to the Church to end Reverend Smyth’s abuse. Brady interviewed Boland and was given a list of children Reverend Smyth was abusing, Brady swore Boland to silence and informed neither the police or the children’s parents. No action was taken against Reverend Smyth who with the assistance of Brady and the Church’s broader cover up continued to rape children till he was finally arrested in 1991.

Far from being excommunicated for his many crimes The Reverend Smyth was protected for decades by the church which did everything it could to silence his victims, whilst moving Reverend Smyth into new positions where he’d have access to more children to rape. In stark contrast in November 2009 Sister Margaret McBride, who was an administrator at a hospital, saved the life of a gravely ill 11 week pregnant woman by approving an abortion and was summarily excommunicated for doing so.

If the pregnancy had continued doctors warned there was “close to 100 percent” risk of the patient (who was incidentally incidentally a mother of 4) dying, this would obviously have resulted in the death of the foetus as well. For choosing one death over two and protecting four children who would otherwise have lost their mother Sister Margaret McBride was excommunicated. It would seem to the church that whilst ‘unborn children’ deserve protection actual children deserve protection from neither paedophile priests nor their parents needlessly dying.

Bishop Vernon Myer was excommunicated, not for raping children or enabling the rape of children but for taking part of the ordination of a woman!

Far from being excommunicated or in any way reprimanded for swearing victims of child rape to silence & not telling victims parents or the police about the active rapist in their midst Cardinal Brady’s career flourished.

You do have to wonder about the moral standing of an organisation which protects, enables and continues to employ paedophiles, promotes the protectors and enablers of paedophiles yet imposes it’s harshest penalties upon those who ordinate women and save the lives of dangerously ill pregnant women.