MILWAUKEE –
Caught in a controversy over medical ethics and excommunicated, Mercy Sr. Margaret McBride thought she would find all of her healing from the church. But she said she found healing in a conversation with the patient who unwittingly was at the center of the debate.
McBride, a former vice president of mission integration and a member of the ethics committee at the St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center in Phoenix, was in the news last year when it became public that the ethics committee assented to the abortion of an 11-week-old fetus in order to save the life of a pregnant woman suffering from pulmonary hypertension.
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She related her feelings in the aftermath of the controversy and being excommunicated.
“And in that strange sort of way, it connected me even more to the church, and even more to the suffering church,” she said.
“You know, the word excommunication has a very powerful meaning when you’re sitting in the midst of being excommunicated,” she said. “It’s when you want the Eucharist, it’s when you want to be in the presence of the Catholic community, and when it’s suddenly denied to you.”
She told the audience that she complied with the bishops’ two requests for the excommunication to be lifted. One request was that she had to go to confession to a priest, and the other was she had to resign her position.
“So I want you to know that in my journey I did reconcile with the church,” she said. “The church means something very different to me today. Something has to be taken away sometimes for you to appreciate it even more. So it is now that I believe I am called to do something and I don’t know what that something is, but I pray that through the grace of God to give me that opportunity to know what the next step is for me.”
