Kerre Woodham: Vatican's heirarchy of sins

For years, I've thought when push came to shove and I was hovering between this world and the next, I'd do a Lord Marchmain in Brideshead Revisited and call in a priest to hear my deathbed confession. And a fairly lengthy act of contrition.

Like Lord Marchmain, I haven't given the Catholic Church a lot of thought in the past 20-odd years, despite being raised a practising Catholic. But like Lord Marchmain, I feel it can't possibly hurt to have a bob each way and cover your bases.

However, as blemished as my soul is, I'm not going to be offering it to the Catholic church while the current regime is in power.

The story of the 9-year-old girl from Brazil who became pregnant with twins after being raped by her stepfather was tragic.

But it was the Catholic church's actions that I found particularly abhorrent. The Brazilian bishop excommunicated the girl's mother for allowing her daughter to undergo a medical abortion. He also excommunicated the doctors who performed the procedure.

But did they boot out the rapist stepfather? No, they did not because, according to the bishops, while the crime of rape is dreadful, the sin of murder is worse.

Now, normally you could excuse this as the rantings of a renegade, hard-line fundamentalist trapped in the church like a bug in amber. But the Brazilian bishop's rulings were upheld by the Vatican.

Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, the head of the Catholic Church's Congregation for Bishops, told an Italian newspaper that his colleagues in Brazil had made the right decision.

"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 said.

He added that "life must always be protected. The attack on the Brazilian church is unjustified".

According to the doctors who were attending to the 35kg child, she was too physically immature to carry one child, let alone two, and it was highly likely that one life, and two potential lives, would have been lost.

But clearly that doesn't matter to the Vatican. Wombs are there to carry human life or die trying. Better a girl child kills herself bearing future Catholics than she be helped to heal and have a life of her own.

It's sick. But the sickos aren't just living in lavish apartments at the expense of others in Rome. Oh, no. They are alive and well and living among us.

When I raised this story on my talkback show, more out of sorrow and anger than any expectation that it would prompt debate, a woman started quoting vast tracts of the Bible at me.

In between she said she wasn't a Catholic but she wholeheartedly supported the decision because she, too, thought that - and I paraphrase - child rape was better than abortion.

What she said was rape was a lesser crime than murder, but you get the drift. She finished by quoting Genesis and thundering that God said we should go forth and multiply and that proved the girl should have carried the twins to term.

She wasn't alone. Another (woman) caller said the birth of twins would be a cleansing experience for the girl after the horror of the rape. Cleansing?! We're talking about a 9-year-old carrying to term twins conceived from rape.

The only consolation is that these women were shouted down in a hail of calls and text messages from people horrified that such fundamentalism could trump basic humanity.

There are many good people who work within the Catholic church. Many do so in spite of the church hierarchy rather than as a result of it. But the sort of fanaticism we've seen from the Brazilian bishops won't have won the church any converts - and may have lost a few existing souls as well.

* www.kerrewoodham.com