Tag: The Catholic church

A word of advice for schoolteachers: don’t ever seek a job in Cincinnati Catholic Archdiocese schools. You’d have to sign a contract that makes you their slave.

The Archdiocese has a new contract for teachers, one that’s twice the size of previous contracts, to accommodate the many things it tells you not to do.

The contract for the 2014-15 school year explicitly orders teachers to refrain “from any conduct or lifestyle which would reflect discredit on or cause scandal to the school or be in contradiction to Catholic doctrine or morals.” It goes so far as to ban public support of the practices.

Principals in the 94 Archdiocese-supervised schools in Southwest and Central Ohio began receiving the new employment agreements Thursday. More than 2,200 Greater Cincinnati parochial teachers will be affected by the new contract, the Archdiocese estimates.

I wonder how many of them are looking around for a new job right now.

Under the new contract, teachers are expressly prohibited from: “improper use of social media/communication, public support of or publicly living together outside of marriage; public support of or sexual activity out of wedlock; public support of/or homosexual lifestyle; public support of/or use of abortion; public support of/or use of a surrogate mother; public support or use of in vitro fertilization or artificial insemination.”

The wording is horrendously foggy – maybe whoever drew up that contract should do a refresher course in how to English – but you can figure out what they’re trying to say. You can’t publicly support “living together outside of marriage.” You also can’t yourself “live together outside of marriage.” (What, no roommates? What do people do if they can’t afford the rent? Or if they just want company around the house? If they just like sharing the rent and the chores with a friend or two or four?) You can’t support “sexual activity out of wedlock” and you also can’t fuck someone you’re not married to. You can’t support “homosexual lifestyle” and you also can’t be lesbian or gay or bi. (I don’t even know what the Vatican thinks about being trans. Maybe it forbids itself to have an opinion.) You can’t support “use of abortion” and you can’t yourself have an abortion. (What if you’ve already had one, or more than one? Is that a firing offense?) You can’t support “use of a surrogate mother” and you can’t “use” a surrogate mother yourself. Does that also mean you can’t be a surrogate mother? Is it ok to be one but not to “use” one? Who the fuck knows. The Archdiocese has its list of rules, and it’s doing its best to put them into a contract; don’t bother it with tiresome questions.

In short, the Archdiocese thinks it has the right to be all up in your business every hour of every day just because you work for one of its schools.

The contractual language is a first because it brings more specificity to the individual teacher employment agreement and what practices will cost teachers their jobs.

And it further focuses on the Archdiocese’s established philosophies and the importance of adhering to Catholic teachings, Archdiocese spokesman Dan Andriacco said.

“There aren’t any new expectations of our teachers in the 2014-2015 contract. The revised wording is just more explicit in that it lists examples of behaviors that are unacceptable as contrary to church teaching,” Andriacco said. “We think that’s fairer to the teachers and a help to them.

“We’ve always regarded our schools as a ministry. That’s why we open the doors in the morning. Not all of our students are Catholic and not all of our teachers are Catholic, but all of our schools are Catholic. And we found out from listening sessions around the Archdiocese two years ago – when we developed our Vision for Catholic Schools – that Catholic identity is very important to our Catholic school families,” Andriacco said.

And what is Catholic “identity”? For the majority of Catholics, it’s much more a matter of shared rituals and symbols than it is of obedience to that hateful list of Forbidden Things above. Much more. But the Archdiocese wants to interpret it is both permission and demand for more rigorous enforcement of the hateful rules.

Before and after: New restrictions in teacher contract

 

• The 2013-14 teacher employment contract for the Cincinnati Archdiocese has provisions on personal behavior, but not as detailed as the one teachers will be required to sign for the 2014-15 school year. Teachers must also initial some of the provisions as well as sign the contract agreement.
• The current, three-page contract includes a provision that states in part that teachers: “understand and fulfill his/her duties as a Ministerial employee of the School/Educational Office and serve as a Catholic role model, inside and outside of the classroom, regardless of his/her personal beliefs or other religious affiliation; comply with and act consistently in accordance with the stated philosophy and teachings of the Roman Catholic Church … which include certain proscriptions on personal behavior not adhering to the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church that could be detrimental to the Employee’s ability to serve as a Catholic role model; comply with the policies and directives of the School/Educational Office and the Archdiocese, including without limitation the Archdiocese’s “Ethics and Conduct Policy.”

Hmm. What other kind of thing is detrimental to the Employee’s ability to serve as a Catholic role model? Anything they forgot to mention? Does the Employee have to molest children?

At any rate, they’re not kidding. They do fire people for not being reactionary-Catholic enough.

Recent Archdiocese firings, suspensions, dismissals for clashing with church teaching

 

• In 2009 a nun was suspended by the Archdiocese for publicly supporting the ordination of women priests.
• Later that year a volunteer religion education teacher was dismissed after her letter to The Enquirer in support of the suspended nun was published.
• In 2010 the Cincinnati Archdiocese fired an unmarried teacher who became pregnant by artificial insemination. A federal court ruled in 2013 in her favor, ordering the Archdiocese to pay her $171,000 for her improper firing.
• In 2013, an assistant principal at Purcell Marian High School was fired for writing on his public blog his support of gay marriage.

You have been warned.

Jennifer Collins at Religion News reports on Ireland’s little problem with Catholic saturation of the public state-funded schools.

The Catholic Church runs 90 percent of primary schools in Ireland. The rest are mainly Protestant, and about 4 percent are managed by the nonprofit Educate Together, which is nonsectarian.

The arrangement is unsettling to some parents who have little choice in where to send their children.

“They integrated religion into every subject in the school,” said Martijn Leenheer, an atheist who moved from the Netherlands to a small village in west Ireland eight years ago. “For instance, in biology, they would say ‘God created these flowers.’ Even in math they do it. They basically make religion part of everything in the school.”

Although he requested that his son opt out of religious classes, Leenheer later found that his son was learning how to recite prayers and said the school’s principal was unsympathetic to his concerns.

He had to move to be able to have access to one of the Educate Together schools.

Jane Donnelly of Atheist Ireland said the European court’s decision may help parents like Leenheer.

“If you’ve got nowhere else but to send your child to the local school and the local school is Catholic and the state is funding that education for your child, then the state should be responsible for the protection of your human rights in that school and for religious discrimination in that school,” said Donnelly.

Ireland’s system of school patronage provides for public funding of schools but allows private groups to establish schools as long as there is sufficient demand.

Long the most powerful institution in Ireland, the Catholic Church has established more than 2,500 schools under the system. Educate Together has 68 schools, mainly in urban areas.

On the one hand more than 2,500, on the other hand 68. Hardly a fair fight, is it. Hardly a fair anything, in fact. Why should small children have Catholicism forced on them at school every day? Why should anyone, but especially small children, who naturally think that school=authority=truth.

Responsible for their own admission policies, many Irish schools often favor baptized Catholics when enrollment exceeds available seats. As a result, parents sometimes baptize their children in the Catholic faith so they can receive an education.

And then the church gets to count those children and thus gets to inflate its membership. It also does that by counting everyone except people who go to the trouble and expense of getting themselves officially taken off the rolls. The church fights dirty every step of the way.

As part of a study on the church’s role in schools, Ireland’s Department of Education found that around 8 percent of parents in some areas said they might move their children to nondenominational schools if given a chance.

“Everyone accepts that there’s probably an oversupply of Catholic schools at primary level,” said Drumm, though he added that a “blanket divesting” from church-run schools would only harm the education system.

Atheists like Donnelly remain skeptical.

“They might hand over a few schools here and there to try to give the impression that something is happening on the ground, but in reality they have no intention of handing over enough schools to radically change the system,” she said.

But the mere fact that Ireland is having the debate, albeit with the help of the European court, shows that the country is growing more diverse even as it retains its strong Catholic identity.

A “strong Catholic identity” that has been forced on it in myriad ways. It’s more like a strong Catholic prison than a strong Catholic identity.

There’s a hearing on institutional responses to child sexual abuse in the Catholic church going on in Sydney now. It started off with a bang on Monday…

Victims of child abuse and their supporters walked out of a public hearing at the royal commission into institutional responses to child sexual abuse after the Catholic church’s legal representative quoted the Bible in his opening address.

…

Peter Gray, representing the church’s Truth, Justice and Healing Council began his opening statement by quoting a passage from the gospel of Mark, prompting cries of shock and disgust in the hearing room.

“Many will remember, from their own childhoods, the ageless words from the gospel of Mark,” said Gray.

“Let the little children come to me; do not stop them; for it is to such of these that the kingdom of God belongs.”

Members of Care Leavers Australia Network and survivors of abuse walked out of the room, some in tears.

Speaking to reporters outside the commission during a recess, Trish Charter said that at that point she could not listen any more and that hearing the words was “crashing us back down”.

Imbecile. Think about it. What do these many remember from their own childhoods? Hearing those “ageless words” in a context that made them a foul, cruel joke. Hearing them uttered by men who did nothing to help the real children in their power, or men who abused the real children in their power. Talk about whited sepulchre! King Lear says it best:

Thou rascal beadle, hold thy bloody hand.

Why dost thou lash that whore? Strip thine own back.

Thou hotly lust’st to use her in that kind

For which thou whipp’st her. The usurer hangs the cozener.

Through tattered clothes great vices do appear;

Robes and furred gowns hide all. Plate sin with gold,

And the strong lance of justice hurtless breaks.

Arm it in rags, a pigmy’s straw does pierce it.

David Marr reports on the first day’s testimony.

At one end of an immensely expensive room in the Sydney legal district was a squad of lawyers briefed months ago for the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse.

But in the gallery at the other end sat victims and the parents and friends of victims who have been on the case for nearly 20 years. For some it has become their life’s work. And they came from all points on Monday to see what they had managed at last: to put the Catholic Church in the dock.

They made their presence felt. They groaned. They protested. A handful walked out when Peter Gray SC, counsel for the church’s Truth, Justice and Healing Council, began by quoting the “ageless words” of St Mark: “Let the little children come to me.”

Gray laid on the apologies not with a trowel but a front-end loader. He called abuse by clergy and its concealment by the church unbearable, disgraceful, heartbreaking, shattering and devastating. He declared the royal commission, “a watershed in church history and indeed in Australian history”.

The gallery was unmoved. For 20 years the church has been saying sorry and promising to do better. Nothing to applaud here. Nor did the campaigners seem impressed by Gray’s fresh assurances the church would co-operate “fully, without reservation” with the commission.

Isn’t that called, obeying the law?

Well…yes, for ordinary humans, it is, but for people with special tickets from god, it’s a different story.

Timothy Dolan again. Remember Timothy Dolan? Former archbishop of Milwaukee? Now archbishop of New York? Also a cardinal?

The Timothy Dolan who whined and complained, in March 2010, about the unfair and meany way journalists would keep reporting on the Catholic church’s habit of protecting priests who rape children. He seems to have removed that post from his archepiscopal blog now, but the Internet archive still has it.

So Friday’s headline, only the most recent, stings us again:  “Doctor Asserts Church Ignored Abuse Warnings,” as the psychiatrist who treated the criminal, Dr. Werner Huth, blames the Church for not heeding his recommendations.

What adds to our anger over the nauseating abuse and the awful misjudgment in reassigning such a dangerous man, though, is the glaring fact that we never see similar headlines that would actually be “news”:  How about these, for example?

–    “Doctor Asserts He Ignored Abuse Warnings,” since Dr. Huth admits in the article that he, in fact, told the archdiocese the abusing priest could be reassigned under certain restrictions, a prescription today recognized as terribly wrong;

–    “Doctor Asserts Public Schools Ignored Abuse Warnings,” since the data of Dr. Carol Shakeshaft concludes that the number of cases of abuse of minors by teachers, coaches, counsellors, and staff in government schools is much, much worse than by priests;

–    “Doctor Asserts Judges (or Police, Lawyers, District Attorneys, Therapists, Parole Officers) Ignored Abuse Warnings,” since we now know the sober fact that no one in the healing and law enforcement professions knew back then the depth of the scourge of abuse, or the now-taken-for-granted conclusion that abusers of young people can never safely work closely with them again.

What causes us Catholics to bristle is not only the latest revelations of sickening sexual abuse by priests, and blindness on the part of some who wrongly reassigned them — such stories, unending though they appear to be, are fair enough, — but also that the sexual abuse of minors is presented as a tragedy unique to the Church alone.

No, it isn’t, but even if it were, you self-justifying piece of crap, that would be because of the way you presume to inhabit the moral high ground and to tell everyone else what to do. The point is that your claims to moral elevation are disgusting and contemptible, and your attempts to boss everyone and to meddle with politics while enjoying tax-exempt status are an outrage.

And you haven’t learned a god damn thing.

Files released by the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Milwaukee on Monday reveal that in 2007, Cardinal Timothy F. Dolan, then the archbishop there, requested permission from the Vatican to move nearly $57 million into a cemetery trust fund to protect the assets from victims of clergy sexual abuse who were demanding compensation.

That’s our morally elevated cardinal and archbishop – maneuvering to protect the church’s vast – and tax-exempt – bank account from the claims of people who were raped by that church’s employees. Cynical, callous, and selfish – that’s your man Cardinal Dolan.

Cardinal Dolan, now the archbishop of New York, has emphatically denied seeking to shield church funds as the archbishop of Milwaukee from 2002 to 2009. He reiterated in a statement Monday that these were “old and discredited attacks.”

However, the files contain a 2007 letter to the Vatican in which he explains that by transferring the assets, “I foresee an improved protection of these funds from any legal claim and liability.” The Vatican approved the request in five weeks, the files show.

So he’s a liar as well.

The release of more than 6,000 pages of documents on Monday was hailed by victims and their advocates as a vindication and a historic step toward transparency and accountability. They were well aware that the archives would bring unusually intense scrutiny to the country’s most high-profile prelate, Cardinal Dolan, who as president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and the archbishop of New York has sought to help the church turn the corner on the era of scandal.

Cardinal Dolan has been regarded by many Catholics as part of the solution. In public appearances, he has expressed personal outrage at the harm done to children, apologized profusely and pledged to help the church and the victims heal.

But the documents lift the curtain on his role as a workaday church functionary concerned with safeguarding assets, persuading abusive priests to leave voluntarily in exchange for continued stipends and benefits, and complying with Rome’s sluggish canonical procedures for dismissing uncooperative priests who he had long concluded were remorseless and a serious risk to children. In one case, the Vatican took five years to remove a convicted sex offender from the priesthood.

Can we stop treating these people as moral authorities? Like, right now?

In 2007, the year Cardinal Dolan asked to transfer the funds, the Wisconsin Supreme Court issued a decision that in effect lifted an unusual law that had long shielded the church from sexual abuse lawsuits. When he was later accused of trying to shield church funds, Cardinal Dolan said on his blog in New York that it was “malarkey” and “groundless gossip.” Archbishop Listecki and former Auxiliary Bishop Sklba invoked a theme that many other church officials have used in the past to explain their conduct: that their missteps reflected a broader lack of awareness about child sexual abuse in society.

Archbishop Listecki wrote that he did not want to make excuses, but that church officials had relied on the advice of doctors and therapists who were “seemingly more concerned about ‘Father’ than about the children.” He said the documents would reveal “the progression and evolution of thinking on this topic.”

However, the Rev. James Connell, a priest in the Milwaukee Archdiocese who helped to form a group called Catholic Whistleblowers, said in an interview that he did not find this claim credible.

“I was in high school in the 1950s,” he said, “and I learned about statutory rape in high school. An adult having sexual activity with a minor is a crime. We knew about it then, so you can’t claim that social thought changed.”

Besides which, the whole point of the Catholic church and its claims to moral authority and right to boss everyone – the whole point, I say – is that it’s timeless and absolute. It’s not supposed to be dependent on things like learning about statutory rape in high school! IT’S SUPPOSED TO BE DIVINE FUCKING REVELATION. If baby Jesus forgot to tell them that fucking little children in secret and threatening them so that they’ll keep the secret is not a nice thing to do – WHAT ELSE DID BABY JESUS FORGET TO TELL THEM?

They are not the moral bosses of us. They are benighted, ignorant, reactionary, misogynist party bureaucrats who protect themselves and each other at the expense of everyone else.

Oh, brilliant – another encroachment by the Catholic church on a secular bit of society.

High-performing Catholic schools are to be given considerable influence over the running and performance of struggling secular schools under plans being drawn up by the Church and government.

Catholic schools are currently bound by strict rules that mean they cannot form federations with their non-faith counterparts. But with the growth of the academies programme and the diminishing influence of local authorities, the Church wants to make a “greater contribution” to the running of different types of schools.

Well of course it does. That way it gets to impose its horrible reactionary anti-woman anti-human dogma on people who are formally outside its “magisterium.” It gets more power and control and influence. Of course the church wants to make a “greater contribution”!

Paul Barber, the new director of the Catholic Education Service, said that Church schools had an important contribution to make. “The point is that Catholic schools are part of a partnership with the state. They feel strongly that they are part of the wider family along with other schools; they share that collective responsibility.

“Many of our schools feel very strongly that they want to make a contribution to that wider scene.”

Yes of course they do. They’re imperialist. They want to spread and take over and dominate. They’re having huge success in taking over all medical care in the US, and they will no doubt have huge success in taking over all primary and secondary schooling in the UK.

“We are trying to explore the various ways in which Catholic schools can, if they wish to, assist other schools, including those which aren’t Catholic. We are looking at other mechanisms, other forms of trust arrangements,” he said.

The plan follows a similar ambition outlined more than a year ago by the Church of England, which also wanted to offer partnerships and advice to non-Church schools.

Of course it did, for the same reasons. Der. They don’t want to fade away, they want more power, more influence, more money, more jobs for the boys.

Mr Barber added that Catholic schools had “general principles about ethos and values” that could be brought to a wider community.

Pre-cisely.

Keith Porteous Wood, executive director of the National Secular Society, said that faith schools should not have a say in how secular schools were run. “Whenever you have a merger or amalgamation of a faith and non-faith school, everything always leans towards faith,” he said. “What if Catholic schools start to insist on a Catholic head or they want to sack people who don’t want to teach RE?”

A report by the British Humanist Association last year highlighted that, in the past five years, a number of schools had been redesignated as faith schools, but that no schools had lost their religious character.

Another front opens.

Cardinal Keith O’Brien, after saying “I never!!” for several days, has given a delicate admission that he was sexually…well he doesn’t say exactly, apart from admitting that it wasn’t quite the done thing. Well he’s a Catholic priest, and a high-ranking one, you can’t expect him to just come right out and say he fucked goats or had affairs with slabs of liver or raped children in the confessional.

Cardinal Keith O’Brien, formerly Britain’s most senior Roman Catholic cleric, today admitted his sexual conduct had “fallen beneath the standards expected of me”.

The Northern Ireland-born cleric stepped down from his post as Archbishop of St Andrews and Edinburgh last month, a day after three priests and one former priest made allegations of “inappropriate” behaviour against him.

After initially denying the allegations, the cardinal last night admitted sexual wrongdoing for the first time, as he asked forgiveness for those he had “offended”.

Frank Bruni wrote a pretty blistering op-ed in the NY Times last week on the Catholic church’s funny way of veering between theocracy and secularism depending on which is most convenient at any particular moment. He pointed out things that don’t get pointed out nearly often enough, especially by hyper-respectable newspapers like the Times.

On the one hand, he notes, you have the bishops shouting about contraceptive coverage in health care plans, and on the other hand, you have lawyers for a Catholic hospital chain arguing that fetuses aren’t persons. And then you have those pesky child-raping priests…

We’ve been getting a fresh and galling peek into that with the court-compelled release of documents from the Los Angeles Archdiocese, which engaged in a pattern of willful blindness and outright cover-up so egregious that the current archbishop, José Gomez, took the shocking step last week of publicly reprimanding his predecessor, Cardinal Roger Mahony.

The documents show that Mahony and his lieutenants repeatedly failed to report allegations to law enforcement officials and urged accused priests to leave or stay out of the state, lest they face prosecution. They decided, in short, that the church’s representatives and reputation mattered more than justice: that the church could hold itself above laws that governed everybody else.

Because free exercise. It’s in the Constitution! It totally means that churches can just make up their own laws and ignore all secular laws and legal institutions!

Not.

Around the country, the church has beaten back lawsuits by priests’ victims and tried not to furnish information about priests’ wrongdoing by claiming that such scrutiny violates the free exercise of religion, said Jeffrey Anderson, a Minnesota lawyer who has represented hundreds of victims over three decades. “It’s audacious, it’s bold and it’s across the board,” he said.

But the church has simultaneously reserved the right to behave just like any other institution, leaning on legal technicalities, smearing victims and demonstrating no more compassion than a tobacco company might show.

Having it both ways is totally part of free exercise, which is in the Constitution.

From my extensive reporting on the sexual abuse crisis in the 1990s, I don’t recall any great push to excommunicate priests who forced themselves on kids. But when Sister Margaret McBride, in 2009, was part of a Phoenix hospital’s decision to abort an 11-week-old fetus inside a 27-year-old woman whose life was gravely endangered by the pregnancy, she indeed suffered excommunication (later reversed).

So a fetus matters more than the ravaged psyche of a raped adolescent? And Sister McBride deserved harsher rebuke than a rapist? It’s hard not to conclude that a church run by men shows them more mercy than it does women (or, for that matter, children).

Definitely children. That woman with the life-endangering pregnancy? She has four young children. Their lives wouldn’t have been improved much if she had died along with her fetuses, I think.

One final verdict is already in. On the charge of self-serving hypocrisy, the church is guilty.

Unanimous.

Jen Gunter is also disturbed by what the Irish bishops said.

Terminating a pregnancy is “gravely immoral in all circumstances.” All circumstances includes 17 weeks and ruptured membranes. Unless I misunderstand the meaning of “all,” then Irish Catholic Bishops also view ending a pregnancy at 17 weeks with ruptured membranes and sepsis, either by induction of labor or the surgical dilation and evacuation (D & E), to be “gravely immoral.” They must also view ending a pregnancy for a woman who previously had postpartum cardiomyopathy and a 50% risk of death in her pregnancy as “gravely immoral.” So if you have a medical condition that is rapidly deteriorating because of your pregnancy, too bad for you if you live in Ireland. Because the mother and unborn baby have equal rights to life, Irish law spares women the anguish of choosing their own life. Neither can be first, so both must die.

Yes. That is also the position – the considered position, the insisted on, mandated, shoutingly ordered position – of all US bishops, because it is the position of their union, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops. That is the position the bishop of Phoenix tried to force St Joseph’s Hospital in Phoenix to promise in writing never to disobey again*.

I posted about it last March.

Yes, Catholic bishops really do take the position that ending a pregnancy at 17 weeks with ruptured membranes and sepsis, either by induction of labor or the surgical dilation and evacuation (D & E), is gravely immoral. In Ireland they do and in the US they do.

They are scarier than almost anyone realizes. They really do try to compel Catholic hospitals to refuse to save women’s lives if they’re in situations like the one that Savita Halappanavar was in. It seems impossible but it’s true.

The statement from the Irish Catholic Bishops is medically nonsensical, contradictory, and immoral and as it represents a group of men who have never practiced medicine opining on an aspect of medical care that they clearly can’t understand.

The only thing this statement clarifies is how Irish physicians could easily be confused by an Irish abortion law steeped in religion, and thus reinforces the claim that Catholicism contributed to Dr. Halappanavar’s death.

Indeed. We desperately need separation of church and medicine.

A reader pointed out an article at “Catholic Health World” –

Interjection: what the hell is “Catholic health”? I know, that’s not what they mean, it’s just the name of a publication of the CHUSA, the Catholic Health Association of the US. But that’s stupid too. We’re deadened to all this because of habituation. We’re used to it so we don’t notice how ridiculous it is, let alone how dangerous it is. Catholic health? Catholic health care? What the hell, man? There is no such thing. Health is health, it isn’t Catholic or Jewish or Baptist. Health care is health care, it isn’t Lutheran or Muslim or Hindu.

An article at “Catholic Health World,” I was saying. Pregnancy complications can bring on complex ethical questions.

Well I can think of some possible ones – like what to do about a woman who wants to risk her life to try to save a fetus that can’t be saved, or even a woman who wants to give up her life to try to save a fetus that can’t be saved. That might be a complex ethical question, because there’s an intuition that it should be her decision, but it has to be horrible to let someone die when you know you could save her.

But that of course is not the kind of complex ethical question they have in mind at CHUSA.

They offer hypotheticals. This one for instance –

A second fictitious case concerned a mother at 15 weeks’ gestation whose fetus is missing part of its brain. The baby will almost certainly die within days of birth. The physician recommends that the mother terminate the futile pregnancy to avoid the psychological distress of carrying a nonviable baby to term.

Slosar said that, applying directive 47, this termination would not be justified because the mother’s life is not at risk — the condition only affects the health of the baby. Also, the reason for the termination — to relieve the psychological burden to the mother — is not considered proportionate to the effect of the act, that is, the death of the baby, within the Catholic moral tradition.

How hateful. The “psychological distress” is grief for the baby and the futility of it all. The stinking CHUSA makes it sound selfish and callous. What good does it do the baby to have a few days outside the uterus? The Catholic moral tradition is brutal.