Nun's excommunication shows hypocrisy

Sister Margaret McBride, the highest-ranking Catholic official at St. Joseph's Hospital and Medical Center in Phoenix, Ariz., was excommunicated earlier this month.

The sin that earned her the most severe punishment the church can dole out?
McBride condoned a life-saving abortion for a patient.


A 27-year-old woman pregnant with her fifth child arrived at St. Joseph's last November in critical condition. Doctors discovered she had pulmonary hypertension, a heart condition that would have almost certainly caused her to die if she had not aborted her 11-week pregnancy.

McBride, the hospital's vice president of mission integration, consulted with a group of medical professionals. They approved the procedure to save the patient, who was already experiencing heart failure, according to hospital records.

The patient survived.

But McBride received no pats on the back for her sound judgment last fall from the church. Instead she's been issued a fierce castigation from high-ranking Catholic officials. She has also lost her prestigious position as St. Joseph's senior diocese liaison and will be reassigned to another post at the hospital.

Bishop Thomas J. Olmsted, who oversees the Phoenix diocese, announced McBride was "automatically excommunicated" for her actions.

In a question and answer document the Diocese of Phoenix provided National Public Radio, church officials say the purpose of excommunication is "to repair scandal, to restore justice and to reform the offender."

Given this definition, excommunication seems a strikingly fitting punishment for some members of the Catholic church who have received far more national attention than McBride for committing another sin: sexually abusing minors.

The growing number of priests charged with molesting children has muddied the church's name with scandal and eroded its foundation as a just institution.

And I think there is a sense of general accord that anyone who ties a 16-year-old altar boy to a bed and rapes him—a crime recently brought against 44-year-old priest Marcin Michal Strachanowski in Brazil—is an offender in dire need of reform.

According to Catholic teaching, McBride committed a crime against an unborn child. "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," Olmsted said in a May 14 statement.

But priests like Strachanowski are not "automatically excommunicated" for their crimes against living children.

Instead, the National Conference of Brazilian Bishops said it hopes to draft a manual to help church officials prevent pedophilia, according to an Associated Press article Tuesday.

McBride's sin saved a woman, and she received the church's most severe reprimand. Strachanowski's sin left a teenager irrevocably scarred, and the church responded with a guidebook.

"In the case of priests who are credibly accused and known to be guilty of sexually abusing children, they are in a sense let off the hook," said Rev. Thomas Doyle, a Catholic canon lawyer, in a May 19 interview with NPR.

Letting these priests off the hook—while denouncing sisters like McBride—does more than extend priests undeserved protections and reveal inconsistent applications of the excommunication punishment. It unveils an ugly and undeniable hypocrisy.

Katie may be reached at kfarden@su-spectator.com