Renato Fisichella, Vatican Bioethics Official, Refuses To Resign After Defending AbortionHuffington Post | NICOLE WINFIELD | 02/22/10 07:08 PM | APVATICAN CITY — The Vatican's top bioethics official on Monday dismissed calls for his resignation following an uproar over
his defense of doctors who aborted the twin fetuses of a 9-year-old child who was raped by her stepfather. Monsignor Renato Fisichella told The Associated Press he refused to respond to five members of the Vatican's Pontifical Academy for Life who questioned his suitability to lead the institution.
Fisichella wrote an article in the Vatican's newspaper in March
saying the Brazilian doctors didn't deserve excommunication as mandated by church law because they were saving the girl's life. The call for mercy sparked heated criticism from some academy members who said it implied the Vatican was opening up to so-called "therapeutic abortion" to save the mother's life.
To quiet their complaints, the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued a clarification in July, repeating the Catholic Church's firm opposition to abortion and saying Fisichella's words had been "manipulated and exploited."
But that didn't stem the criticism, which boiled up again last week when the academy – an advisory body to the pope made up of lay and religious bioethics experts from around the world – held its annual plenary assembly. Five members of the 145-odd member body issued a statement Feb. 16, at the end of the closed meeting, again questioning Fisichella's suitability for office.
They took him to task for his opening speech, in which he described the criticism over his article as being motivated by spite, according to participants.
And they accused him of manipulating the Vatican's July clarification to make it appear that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith had vindicated his original article.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/02/23/renato-fisichella-vatican_n_472928.html">MORE
- The old DeSwiss would be cursing up a storm about now. Yeah, he'd be saying how these old doddering reprobates need to be horse-whipped for trying to justify their moldy religious bullshit at the expense of a 9-year old girl's life. And how they're so fucking out of touch with reality, that the lot of them should be locked-up in an insane asylum.
Yeah, that's what the old DeSwiss might have said. But the new DeSwiss is much more sensitive and tolerant. See???==============================================================================
DeSwiss
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