It's Official: Hell Has Frozen Over

That's how my good friend BAC over at Yikes! calls it, and she's gotta be right.

Archbishop Rino Fisichella, the Vatican HMFIC of the Roman Catholic Bioethics Council, aka the Pontifical Academy for Life, overruled the Brazilian Big Guy Church Dude who excommunicated a couple of Brazilian doctors for ... get this ... performing an abortion.

In this unfortunate case, the girl getting the abortion was nine years old(!) and had been impregnated with twins by -- who else -- her stepfather. The poor little girl weighed only 80 pounds herself, and for her to be forced to carry this abomination of a pregnancy to term would have resulted in the untimely death of both the girl and the twins inside her.

That didn't matter, of course, to the local Brazilian archbishop, one José Cardoso Sobrinho by name, who excommunicated pretty much everyone in sight, including not only the doctors involved but also the girl's mother for authorizing the abortion. But, interestingly enough, not the girl herself. And I wonder about that...

Anyway, back to reality. This marks, I believe, the very first incidence in which the official Catholic hierarchy has even attempted to come to terms with what the rest of us out in the Reality Based Community have known forever: Abortion very often comes down to a choice between the already-born and the not-yet-born. As much as the Religious Right wants to pontificate, to strut and fret their hour upon the stage, to puff their collective feathers over it, the bottom line is that abortion is a decision to be made between a woman and her doctor. And no one else.

So this whole thing gives me some hope that, in spite of that tall-hat former Hitler Youth Pope Guy going around saying shit like condoms cause AIDS and reinstating that Holocaust-denying bishop, the Catholic Church may -- just may -- end up on the side of reason after all.

Okay, you're right. I won't be holding my breath...