The excommunications surrounding the abortion for a nine-year-old Brazilian girl who was raped and impregnated with twins by her stepfather continues to roil Rome. Back at the time, a top Vatican official, Archbishop Rino Fisichella, President of the Pontifical Academy for Life and an apparent up-and-comer in Rome (at least then) wrote in L’Osservatore Romano that the excommunications had been a mistake.
Now Msgr. Michel Schooyans, a professor emeritus of philosophy at the Université Catholique de Louvain, in Belgium has accused Fisichella of “situational morality” and “total relativism”–the Big One in Benedict XVI’s arsenal of anathemas.
LifeSiteNews has coverage:
Mgr. Schooyans bluntly says that Archbishop Salvatore Fisichella, the head of the PAV, justified the abortion of twins of the nine year-old girl in Brazil “on the grounds of compassion towards the little girl and compassion towards the doctors.” The morality expounded in the article, he said, “is a situational morality. According to him, moral principles ought to be taken into consideration in so far as they respect freedom of choice in concrete circumstances. Here we have total relativism.”
What Fisichella failed to do in his March 15th article in L’Osservatore Romano, was to “recommend compassion towards the aborted twins.” “Let it simply be established,” Schooyans wrote, “that [Fisichella] is here admitting direct abortion.”
Schooyans, a member of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences who has written twenty books on political philosophy, contemporary ideologies and international population policies, wrote, “In objective terms, … [the] article provides formidable backing to all who, in Latin America (Brazil, Santo Domingo, etc.) and elsewhere, are waging a campaign to legalise abortion, with the support of President Obama, the European Union, the IPPF and other NGOs.”
Trouble in the king’s court. Which can happen when everything looks like relativism…
H/T: CWNews
Read Previous Post
