The excommunications surrounding the abortion resulting from the case of a 9-year-old girl raped by her abusive stepfather and impregnated with twins were correct and the pastoral care of the child caring and sensitive…And the Vatican official who publicly criticized them is tantamount to being an apologist for abortion.

So say Brazilian church officials who sharply protested the unusually direct criticisms of the Brazilian archbishop’s handling of the case made in the Vatican newspaper by a top Vatican official.

The protest by leading officials of the Archdiocese of Recife, whose archbishop, José Cardoso Sobrinho, pronounced the excommunications of the girl’s mother and physicians and all involved in the abortion (though not the stepfather) was perhaps more unusual in its fierce pushback against an influential prelate in Rome, Archbishop Rino Fisichella, president of the Pontifical Academy for Life.

The archdiocesan officials accused Fisichella of “utter ignorance of the facts” and said his views–Fisichella is the Vatican’s top bioethics official–“may be interpreted as an apologia of abortion, violating the Magisterium of the Church.” Wow. 

(Fisichella can pick his foes–he was also weighing in after another top Vatican official, Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, had supported Archbishop Sobrinho.)

It’s messy, not to mention tragic, but LifeSiteNews has the rundown of the statement of the Brazil church officials, which has good details of the solicitude shown by the parish priest, but also a strong point-by-point defense of excommunications as “therapeutic” and Fisichella as worse than misguided: 

6. The article is, in other words, a direct attack of the defense of the lives of the three children vehemently made by Archbishop José Cardoso Sobrinho and leaves evident how much the author does not have the necessary data or information to speak on the matter, due to his utter ignorance of the facts. The text may be interpreted as an apologia of abortion, violating the Magisterium of the Church. The abortionist doctors were not in the moral crossroads mentioned by the text; on the contrary, they performed the abortion with full knowledge and coherence with what they believe and teach. The hospital in which the abortion on the little girl was performed is one of those in which this procedure is always performed in our state, under the cover of “legality”. The doctors who acted as executioners of the twins declared, and still declare in the national media, that they did what they are used to doing “with great pride”. One of them declared even that: “Then, I have been excommunicated many times”.

Your view? Read it all here…