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(LifeSiteNews) – Readers who have only been following LifeSite for a few years, or those who haven’t had their finger on the pulse of Church issues for a long time, may not be aware that news out of the Vatican did not used to always cause confusion and consternation amongst Catholics. In fact, there was quite often good news out of the Vatican when it came to pro-life issues.

Of course, there were plenty of scandals in the Church before the Francis pontificate. But the disparity between how Church leadership approached these scandals then, particularly when it came to the issue of abortion, versus how it has handled them since Francis took office, could not be more obvious.

One such scandal occurred in 2009, when a nine-year-old girl in Brazil became pregnant with twins after being raped by her stepfather. The abortion lobby immediately began using this heartbreaking case to campaign to liberalize the country’s abortion laws. Ultimately, the twins were aborted, and the local archbishop excommunicated the doctors who committed the abortion. (Under Church law, anyone who willingly procures or commits an abortion automatically incurs excommunication; in this case, the local archbishop publicly announced that the abortionists were excommunicated.)

What followed was what LifeSiteNews co-founder and editor-in-chief John-Henry Westen described during a January 2010 Human Life International conference as “probably the most serious attack on the pro-life movement in its history. It came from the Vatican itself – that’s why it was so serious.”

“The Vatican is the biggest ally of the pro-life movement worldwide, no question,” Westen said in 2010. “Everybody remembers when at the U.N., the Vatican was always the last man standing when it came to international pressure.”

So Archbishop Rino Fisichella, then the head of the Pontifical Academy for Life, shocked the world when he wrote an article in L’Osservatore Romano criticizing the local bishop for excommunicating the doctors.

The secular media loved it. A 2009 Associated Press headline blared, “Vatican archbishop defends doctors in lifesaving abortion.

“What happened next was quite amazing,” Westen recalled. Members of the Pontifical Academy for Life presented Pope Benedict XVI with a “dossier” on the scandal. “That dossier was compiled with information that we have published on LifeSiteNews, as well as all the other information they had amassed. The Holy Father himself then called a meeting with the head of the Secretary of State and ordered a clarification to be published in the Vatican newspaper.”

“That clarification is amazing,” said Westen. “That clarification is probably the strongest statement on pro-life that has been in the Vatican newspaper in its history.”

Watch John-Henry Westen’s full January 2010 speech HERE.

Read our series celebrating LifeSite’s 25-year anniversary HERE.

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