Secular Thought for the Day

The news that a Brazilian archbishop has excommunicated the mother of a child rape victim who helped her to secure an abortion makes me wonder just how many own goals the Catholic Church is capable of making.

This heartless act will add to the guilt and grief of the nine year old victim, who had allegedly been raped since the age of six by her stepfather. Why does the Church behave like this? Because it puts the value of the 'soul' - something that has never been proven to exist - ahead of the life of a living, suffering young girl.

Life is of course an incredibly precious thing - it has taken us 13 billion years to get where we are, on a lonely planet for a fraction of time and space - but is there really a place for religious dogma when it patently causes so much grief? As ever, the main victims in all of this are ordinary women. And how many ordinary catholics will bury their heads in the sand and try to ignore what is going on?

The schism between the views of ordinary Catholics and the hierarchy of the church is likely to grow as people throughout the world become more educated. How many pious catholics give willingly to cancer research when it is stem cell research that is increasingly producing the solutions? How many pious Catholics will start to question what they hear on a Sunday? Hopefully more and more as long as the Catholic hierarchy continues to exacerbate hurt and embarrass its followers in this way.