You can take my comments any way you want, I really don’t care what mindset you wish to ascribe to me.
Just letting you know what sort of impression you are giving. It may have been that you did not want to give that impression.
The simple fact is, the doctors and mother were excommunicated – publicly excommunicated and thereby publicly stigmatized by the Church.
OK, so you think that now everybody will treat the doctors as if they have the plague, but welcome the rapist with open arms?
The rapist is already stigmatized! No one needs to be informed that he is a hideous person–everyone agrees about that.
It may be that you do not understand how the Church works. The Church reacts to problems. In the area of theology, for example, Protestants make much of the fact that it was not until the 1600s Council of Trent that transubstantiation was fully defined. Well, the reason for that was that until the 1500s, there was no need to define it, there was no controversy, no problem.
In the same way, there is no problem with the rapist’s status: *everyone agrees that he did a terrible thing. *There is no need to point that out because it is already perfectly clear.
However, people have been questioning the sinfulness of abortion for a really long time. It is not clear to everyone that abortion is a heinous act. The only people trying to justify child sexual abuse are those who are already so sickening that everybody with an ounce of normality thinks that they are the very worst of grotesque perverts. A person who rapes children is already understood to be someone to be avoided, someone you don’t want around your children, and certainly not someone you want to listen to. But this is not the case with those who advocate abortion, perform abortions, procure abortions.
And that is why abortion has an automatic excommunication and child rape does not.
Altho the Catholic Church teaches that taking a life is an even worse affront to God than raping a child is–as bad as rape is, abortion is worse–the automatic excommunications are not in place rated on how bad the sin is. They are in place for sins which are less clear. As you yourself stated in an earlier post, it doesn’t make sense unless excommunication is not related to the badness of the sin, and that is indeed the case.
The Church has remained complicitly silent on the step-father’s actions, which are …and are also a heinous crime (both moral and legal) in and of themselves.
The Church is in no way complicit in the step-father’s actions, not even by silence. The Church teaches that this is wrong; the rapist is in a state of mortal sin, having an excommunication placed on him would not make his situation any worse than what it is.
the root cause of the abortion
Pregnancy is not a cause of abortion.
I cannot accept that this is the type of thing Jesus had in mind when he founded a Church. I cannot accept that those actions are anything even remotely resembling an ordinance of God.
Do you think that the Catholic Church teaches that raping children is all right? No! along with the rest of the world, the Catholic Church *abhors *this heinous crime.
