EDITORIAL Vatican official misses moral mark in rape
crisis
Images and stories from the Balkans
are like our worst nightmares. Waves of grief-stricken people driven from their
homes, often at gunpoint, into camps where the most fundamental needs cannot be
met. Mass murders. Shallow graves. More recently, reports of systematic rape of
Albanian women -- gang rape, rape camps -- as key components of a campaign of
ethnic cleansing in Kosovo.
We would expect church leaders to have something to say about
this. Pope John Paul II and other Catholic officials have made urgent,
compelling pleas for an end to the human suffering.
A senior Vatican official, though, vice president of the
Pontifical Academy for Life, has made another sort of moral pronouncement, one
that strikes exactly the wrong note. The official, Msgr. Elio Sgreccia,
recently penned a protest against distribution of emergency reproductive kits
for rape victims by the U.N. Population Fund.
The kits contain a powerful contraceptive known as the
morning-after pill. To offer this pill to Kosovar women who have
been raped, according to the monsignor, is tantamount to abortion.
The monsignors ill-timed statement, published in an Italian
Catholic newspaper, is highly unfortunate on at least two counts.
First, it misrepresents church teaching and may wrongly inhibit
Catholic relief organizations from distributing contraceptive pills to women
who have been raped. Where that happens, they will have been cruelly denied a
treatment that is routinely given to rape victims in many U.S. Catholic
hospitals.
Second, the monsignors statement is sure to long overshadow
in the public mind the positive role of the church in these sad times. Never
mind that Catholic relief organizations are tirelessly carrying on their
humanitarian efforts. Never mind church leaders pleas for an end to
ethnic cleansing and bombing. Once again, the churchs public image of
moral rigidity, the pathological fixation on sexual matters, steals the show
from its authentic, compassionate face.
The Vatican has made no definitive ruling against the
morning-after pill which, if administered within 72 hours after a
woman is raped, can prevent ovulation or fertilization of an egg. Under certain
conditions, the treatment is authorized by the ethical directives of U.S.
bishops for Catholic hospitals. The conditions are that sex was not consensual
and that conception has not already occurred.
Determining conclusively that conception has not occurred is
nearly impossible within 72 hours, so many Catholic hospitals, showing
considerably more compassion than the monsignor, choose to err on the side of
relief for rape victims by administering the pill. Such judgment calls, rooted
in reasoning that rape is an act of agression from which a woman has a right to
protection, represent the best of Catholic moral teaching, as hard and fast
absolutes independent of context and persons do not.
Surely the people in Kosovo have suffered enough. The sins against
life, which the monsignor allegedly speaks for, are many and grave.
Catholic relief organizations should be encouraged to administer
the morning-after pill to rape victims, at least under the same
conditions as allowed by U.S. bishops. And a church official who speaks with
such lack of nuance and compassion in such grievous circumstances should be
replaced.
National Catholic Reporter, April 23,
1999
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