NPR reports on the debacle at St. Joseph's

(updated to include Bishop Olmsted’s testudinal visage, above)

Earlier this week it was revealed that a local bishop, Thomas J. Olmsted, had cashiered an administrator at St. Joseph’s hospital after she permitted an abortion to save the life of its mother.

(The bishop also excommunicated the mother, which hardly seemed sporting. I mean, having been in a position essentially to murder her had he been in the operating room that night, Bishop Olmsted with the parting shot of an excommunication leaves himself open to the charge of just being petty.)

NPR reports tonight and makes the obvious point:

It’s funny how the Catholic Church administers punishment with swiftness and surety when the victim is an 11-week-old fetus and the supposed criminal is a woman.

But it has never seemed to act with the same assurance when the victims are hundreds if not thousands of children and the criminals are scores if not hundreds of predatory male priests:

“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,” canon lawyer Rev. Thomas] Doyle says.

Doyle says no pedophile priests have been excommunicated. When priests have been caught, he says, their bishops have protected them, and it has taken years or decades to defrock them, if ever.

“Yet in this instance we have a sister who was trying to save the life of a woman, and what happens to her? The bishop swoops down [and] declares her excommunicated before he even looks at all the facts of the case,” Doyle says.