The controversial abortion performed on a nine-year-old girl has a new wrinkle, as a Vatican official weighs in:

An influential prelate said Brazilian doctors didn’t deserve excommunication for aborting the twin fetuses of a 9-year-old child who was allegedly raped by her stepfather because the doctors were saving her life.

The statement by Archbishop Rino Fisichella in the Vatican newspaper Sunday was highly unusual because church law mandates automatic excommunication for abortion. Fisichella, who heads the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy for Life, also upheld the church’s ban on abortion and any implications of his criticism of excommunicating the doctors and the girl’s mother weren’t clear.

Fisichella argued for a sense of “mercy” in such cases and respect for the Catholic doctors’ wrenching decision, and strongly criticized fellow churchmen who singled out the doctors and mother for public condemnation.

“Before thinking about excommunication, it was necessary and urgent to save her innocent life and bring her back to a level of humanity of which we men of the church should be expert and masters in proclaiming,” Fisichella wrote.

The doctors, Fisichella noted, had said the child’s life was in danger if the pregnancy continued.

“How should one act in these cases? An arduous decision for the doctor and for moral law itself,” Fisichella wrote, urging respect for the inner “conflict” that the Catholic doctors must have suffered before deciding on the abortion.

Earlier this month, the archbishop of Recife, where the child and her family lives, made a public announcement about the excommunication, which is the church’s most severe penalty. Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, a top Vatican official, has supported the archbishop.

But Fisichella criticized the archbishop’s public denunciation, writing 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.”

Fisichella stressed that abortion is always “bad.” But he said the quick proclamation of excommunication “unfortunately hurts the credibility of our teaching, which appears in the eyes of many as insensitive, incomprehensible and lacking mercy.”

The Vatican teaches that anyone performing or helping someone to have an abortion is automatically excommunicated from the church, and the Vatican prelate underlined that abortion is “always condemned by moral law as an intrinsically evil act.”

“There wasn’t any need, we contend, for so much urgency and publicity in declaring something that happens automatically,” Fisichella wrote.

Writing as if he were addressing the girl, Fisichella said: “There are others who merit excommunication and our pardon, not those who have allowed you to live and have helped you to regain hope and trust.”

UPDATE: Bishops in Brazil have now denied that any excommunications have taken place:

Brazil’s Catholic bishops conference denied that the archbishop of Recife and Olinda, Jose Cardoso Sobrinho, excommunicated the mother and doctors who practiced a legal abortion on a 9-year-old girl that was pregnant with twins after being raped by her stepfather.

The secretary general of the bishops conference, Dimas Lara Barbosa, said that the prelate “at no time excommunicated anyone.”

The case won notoriety and sparked a controversy between Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who defended the medical position of saving the girl’s life because of her pelvic incapacity to continue with the high-risk pregnancy, and the Catholic hierarchy, backed by the Vatican.

“People who consciously work to stop a birth are placing themselves outside the communion of the church, because they no longer share the Christian philosophy, which is in defense of life,” Lara said. “We don’t know who does or does not have this act on his conscience.”

The president of the bishops conference, Cardinal Geraldo Lyrio Rocha, commented that “excommunication is not synonymous with condemnation to hell. I say that because in the popular imagination, when someone was excommunicated it seemed he was being sent to hell.”