Is Saving A Life Dogma Or Love?

In Phoenix, the Roman Catholic Church fired one of its hospitals after it performed an abortion to save a woman's life. Nicholas Kristof writes:

To me, this battle illuminates two rival religious approaches, within the Catholic church and any spiritual tradition. One approach focuses upon dogma, sanctity, rules and the punishment of sinners. The other exalts compassion for the needy and mercy for sinners — and, perhaps, above all, inclusiveness.

The thought that keeps nagging at me is this: If you look at Bishop Olmsted and Sister Margaret [a member of of the hospital's ethics panel who was excommunicated for authorizing the abortion] as the protagonists in this battle, one of them truly seems to me to have emulated the life of Jesus. And it’s not the bishop, who has spent much of his adult life as a Vatican bureaucrat climbing the career ladder. It’s Sister Margaret, who like so many nuns has toiled for decades on behalf of the neediest and sickest among us.

I wish it were that simple. It's easy to say that the hospital should've been more flexible in this case. I would've voted with Sister Margaret. But Jesus preached about personal righteousness as well as peace and justice. The gospel and therefore the church are both about authority and love. The right balance was easy for Jesus to strike, less so for his imperfect followers. For instance, the Vatican's against capital punishment as well as abortion. Kristof is discomfited by its enforcement of dogma because it excommunicated Sister Margaret. But how would his column have read if the church had excommunicated a prison guard who participated in an execution?

Anglileaks

Thanks to Wikileaks, we know that the British ambassador to the Vatican warned that the Pope's shepherd-stealing could lead to anti-Catholic discrimination and violence in England.

Looking Down The Pope's Nose

A secretive traditionalist sect that's too weird even for the Vatican.

Women Aren't The Problem

Thomas C. Fox, editor of the National Catholic Reporter, is bemused as the Vatican announces that it will study women religious (that is, nuns) in the U.S. with an eye to understanding why their numbers are dwindling. In his Feb. 20 Editor's Note, he writes that when the Roman Catholic church mounted an effort in the late 1980s to understand more about the role of women in the church, Benedictine Sister Joan Chittister said:

Women aren't the problem...patriarchy is the problem, sexism is the problem, male chauvinism is the problem, a skewed, distorted and enslaved theology of God is the problem. Write papers about those, indeed, but don't write one about women.