It's a catchy title, but I want to be clear up front that this is not a church-bashing diary. I read the opinion piece in today's New York Times on Sister Margaret McBride and her excommunication from the Catholic Church, and I wanted to share some thoughts. I realize some folks will use this as a church-bashing forum, but I plan on ignoring those individuals.
I think this incident highlights misogyny, but that when we see it in the church it is simply a clearer, more structured version of the misogyny that we also find in our general culture. In other words, the church doesn't go to any lengths to hide or massage its anti-woman policies with fancy language or rationalizations. They are straight-forward about them.
Follow me over the jump for more info and thoughts.
Today's New York Time's includes an opinion piece by Nicholas D. Kristof that tells the story of Sister Margaret McBride who was excommunicated from the Roman Catholic Church for her part in a hospital decision to terminate a pregnancy to save a woman's life. Here is a quick quote:
Sister Margaret was a senior administrator of St. Joseph’s Hospital in Phoenix. A 27-year-old mother of four arrived late last year, in her third month of pregnancy. According to local news reports and accounts from the hospital and some of its staff members, the mother suffered from a serious complication called pulmonary hypertension. That created a high probability that the strain of continuing pregnancy would kill her.
"In this tragic case, the treatment necessary to save the mother’s life required the termination of an 11-week pregnancy," the hospital said in a statement. "This decision was made after consultation with the patient, her family, her physicians, and in consultation with the Ethics Committee."
Sister Margaret was a member of that committee. She declined to discuss the episode with me, but the bishop of Phoenix, Thomas Olmstead, ruled that Sister Margaret was "automatically excommunicated" because she assented to an abortion.
"The mother’s life cannot be preferred over the child’s," the bishop’s communication office elaborated in a statement.
Many readers will be outraged at this event because pedophile priests have gotten away with a slap on the wrist, and the nun's punishment is much more severe. Others will be outraged because this event clearly illustrates why keeping abortion legal is important. And many will say "good riddance, she should leave that awful church anyway." But few readers will wonder about why she does stay with the church or why losing communion rights is such a big deal.
I am not Catholic, but I am a practicing Christian. I find the core messages of the New Testament to be so powerful that I am willing to overlook the crap that the organized religion has built around it over the last 2000 years. There is always a tension between the ideas of leaving a system and working to change it from within. Most readers here at DailyKos have chosen to work within the Democratic Pary dispite all its inherent and structural flaws. People who stick with the Catholic Church have made a similar difficult decision.
This story is about more than misogyny in the Catholic Church. It's a story about faith in action and unanswered questions. For example, what does Sister Margaret think about abortion in general? How does she strive to meet the medical and spiritual needs of the patients at the hospital? How does she maneuver within the hospital staff, family, church personnel, and get things done? How does she reconcile her individual faith journey while living with the broader church?
Readers who have no connection to religion may think none of this matters, but a woman like Sister Margaret is actually a skilled organizer--someone we could all learn from. And her faith plays a huge role in her development as an organizer and as someone who serves the community.