Two weeks ago I wrote a column about a 9-year-old Brazilian girl getting an abortion and the reaction of the Catholic archbishop in her town. That column lost me, officially at least, one reader of a newspaper that publishes Grace Notes. She notified the editor that she no longer wanted to read my false attacks against her church.
I read her e-mail. She was hurt and, I think, scared.
Perhaps I would have lost even more readers had the same column not been pulled, before publication, from another paper. When that editor left a message informing me of his decision, I was intrigued. I called back and said, “I’m so, so, curious, and really surprised. Tell me why. What bothers you about it?”
He had his reasons. Among them, that the column wasn’t in sync with my usual tone: He thought it too angry. He felt many of his paper’s readers didn’t know me yet, and perhaps needed to be brought more slowly into my rants. It is, after all, easier to get a point across to an audience that knows you; they will grant you leeway even when they don’t agree.
The issue was the Brazilian 9-year- old girl who had an abortion. She was pregnant with twins, and carrying them to birth, according to her two doctors, would have killed her. Her mother found out her child was pregnant, and that she’d been raped by her stepfather, who is now in jail. Mother and doctors chose abortion.
Archbishop Jose Cardoso Sobrinho of Recife quickly and publicly excommunicated the doctors involved and the girl’s mother, but not the step- father. I thought this excommunication was outrageous; I thought someone higher up would quickly recant.
This is not what happened. Instead, a Vatican official, Cardinal Giovanni Batista Re, came forward to say he was in full support of the excommunications. I then wrote a column, and, yes, I used numerous adjectives to describe their public announcements — embarrassing, cruel, judgmental, rigid and repugnant were among them.
I bring this all up again because the situation has changed and I’d like to, happily, bang a tambourine about that.
Archbishop Rino Fisichella, the head of bioethics at the Vatican, publicly declared in a Vatican newspaper article that the cardinal’s statement had caused anger and resentment that threatened the credibility of the church and her teachings, making them seem “in the eyes of many . . . (as) insensitive, incomprehensible and lacking in mercy.”
This issue has set off a slip-sliding mess of disagreements within the Catholic Church. Some support excommunication, some are furious, and it has trickled down to regular Catholics on the street.
Columnists, like me, have even written about it.
Well, good for all of us. Especially good for the church higher-ups.
Messy disagreements are an excellent way to practice our humanity. If dogma and institutional practices aren’t examined, institutions risk becoming big, ancient lumps, deserving of nothing and serving no one.
Today, we face hard issues. Black-and-white answers to really hard questions are impossible. My column is often about issues that tend to be gray, and thus messy.
I write about faith and hope and grief and love. I also write about ghosts and cooking, and boys and girls and dogs and birds and racism and sexuality. I write about priests and rabbis and rocket flight and skunks.
I write about things I love. And I write about things that sometimes make people uncomfortable. I think most readers hang in there with me when I do, even when I get angry, even when they think I’ve fallen off a high cliff of huff.
I write about God, and particularly about how God supports and heals. And that, too, sometimes makes people uncomfortable.
So much binds us to each other and to God — and is the same the world over and in every religion — hope, charity, compassion, love, hate, grief, loss, mercy, death, failure, success, happiness, sadness, grace.
Sometimes my column hollers. Sometimes it suggests. Sometimes it whispers. All the time it is a kind of prayer — a hum and rock of images and ideas that hopefully knit themselves into something solid, something that may move people, or help them move through. This is what I do.
E-mail Fort Collins poet and writer Natalie Costanza-Chavez at grace-notes@comcast.net. Read more of her essays at .
