Margaret Mary McBride, a member of the Sisters of Mercy who concurred in an ethics committee’s decision to abort the fetus of a gravely ill woman at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Phoenix, Ariz., was “automatically excommunicated by that action,” said Bishop Thomas J. Olmsted of Phoenix in a statement on May 14. The patient, who has not been identified, was 11 weeks pregnant and suffering from pulmonary hypertension, a condition that the hospital said carried a near-certain risk of death for the mother if the pregnancy continued. “If there had been a way to save the pregnancy and still prevent the death of the mother, we would have done it. We are convinced there was not,” said a letter to Bishop Olmsted on May 17 from top officials at Catholic Healthcare West, the San Francisco-based health system to which the hospital belongs. But the bishop said that “the direct killing of an unborn child is always immoral, no matter the circumstances, and it cannot be permitted in any institution that claims to be authentically Catholic.”
Sister Excommunicated Over Abortion
Show Comments (
)
Comments are automatically closed two weeks after an article's initial publication. See our comments policy for more.
The latest from america
Pope Leo told his ecumenical audience: “By celebrating together this Nicene faith and by proclaiming it together, we will also advance towards the restoration of full communion among us.”
Blessed Carlo Acutis offers a counterexample for our digital age: a teenager who embraced technology not as an escape, but as a tool for communion—with others, and with God.
“Carney is responding to the [immigration] backlash but also to the Trump effect, which is placing more pressure on Canada to tighten its border.”
The war in Gaza has become one in which “the heart-rending price is being paid by children, the elderly and the sick.” Israel, along with its allies, especially including the United States, must reckon that cost as well.