It takes very little to annoy the Vatican. As proof, Amnesty International seems to have managed it.

It’s odd because Amnesty is an organization, like Médecins sans Frontières, that is pretty as a pearl, selfless as a live organ donor and pretty much morally unassailable. We’re all for human rights and medical care for the poor and the stomped-on of this world, correct?

Not so much, says the Vatican.

Amnesty recently decided on a policy it had been discussing for some time. Without stating a position on abortion generally, it said it would campaign for abortion rights in cases of rape, incest or violence, or where the mother’s life or health is in danger.

Although rape has always been used in war as a means of terrifying and subjugating the civilian population, the impetus appears to be the horrific rapes inflicted upon women in Darfur.

It took Amnesty long enough to reach this conclusion, but like all organizations depending upon consensus, it has been described as “a huge creaking oil tanker that takes a very long time to turn around.”

Wartime rape is an appalling crime—armed and powerful aggressors against helpless people—but it gets worse: The victims, like German women after the Russian Army descended in 1945, are shunned by their own community. Silence descends. I always thought the worst story out of Darfur was of refugees reduced to renting a piece of shade under a tree. But there are worse torments.

Every fetus is sacred: church

The Vatican disagrees with Amnesty. Even though there are cases where the women of Africa suffer all four of the conditions listed by the group, the church has no pity. It says that all Catholics must now cease to support Amnesty’s work. Fetuses, whether created by sexual torture or not, trump the mental and physical health of a pregnant woman.

As a result, people fighting oppression in Burma, Zimbabwe, Guatemala—all supported by Amnesty—can go hang. They don’t matter as much as a clump of cells—“the most vulnerable and defenceless form of human life,” one British bishop said, decrying Amnesty&#0148inside the body of a woman bleeding to death on the hot sands of Kutum. The woman might have been out gathering firewood for her family, with her female friends for safety, ever since African Union soldiers ceased going on protective “firewood patrols.” She would have had her legs spread open by four men with guns, as one victim described it.

But hey, at least she has that tree branch rental to shade her head for an hour.

Abortion is legal in Europe (except Malta and in almost all cases in Ireland) and is permitted in most African and Latin American countries in cases of rape or where the mother’s life is in danger. However, the Islamic world (except for Tunisia) is at one with the Vatican: no abortion rights for women under any circumstances.

Prosperity, Popes and the death of frogs

At this point, one must consider the source. Catholicism used to be a religion that means business, and it still does in poverty-stricken countries such as Mexico.

But as nations emerge into prosperity, the Vatican and the Catholic population inevitably diverge. I am always puzzled by journalists who invariably preface the word “Catholic” with “devout.” Aside from Bobby and Ethel Kennedy, Stephen Colbert’s parents and that crazy woman in Arkansas last week who just gave birth to her 14th child and plans to stay the course, who is truly devout in that all-important child-bearing sense? How many Cheaper by the Dozen families do you know in Canada?

Catholics may believe, but they don’t blindly follow what the Vatican instructs. Many privately disagree and have done so for decades.

Catholicism is a religion. The Vatican is a building. The building gets steamed pretty easily. Modern Catholics, in comparison—with their small families, their rage at the church’s cover-up of child abuse, their admirably disciplined high schools for today’s rat-tailed teenagers and their belief that there is a meaning to life—seem rational by comparison. I envy their metaphysical beliefs, having none myself.

But the old men who tread the halls of that Pentagon-sized structure in Rome? They strike me as guys who don’t get out much, not even to meet their own adherents, and that’s why I suspect that donations to Amnesty will rise, even among Catholics. The Vatican has gone badly wrong in kicking tens of thousands of African rape victims, who are not suffering merely in theory, but in reality. “Boys throw stones at frogs in sport,” Plutarch wrote. “But frogs do not die in sport, they die in earnest.”

Lives of women in Africa

I would ask any reader who toes the Vatican hard line that African women have not reached the limits of suffering to read the Canadian journalist Stephanie Nolen’s great book 28: Stories of AIDS in Africa. After you have put the book down, tell me if you can’t bend in homage to the strength and endurance of women who have seen horrors you can’t imagine. Personal bias declared:

âe¢ All religions are equally puzzling to me.

âe¢ My stepchildren went to French Catholic school. I was fine with that.

âe¢ Even as my political beliefs are changing, I have continued my donations to Amnesty and will increase them now.

âe¢ I have friends who have been raped and friends who have had abortions.

âe¢ I once came close to fainting. It happened in the crypt far beneath St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican grounds, with a Valpolicella hangover and the guide droning on about “Peeter’s boons.” It was awful.

I hold no grudge over that last point except against Globe and Mail journalist Eric Reguly, who assured me it was a great way to spend a morning in ye olde patriarchal Rome, if you like catacombs, which I do not.

This Week

After I left the University of Toronto and then the run-down Ryerson polytech that taught me journalism, I swore I would never again allow myself to be marked. In the mail this week, I received the summary of student evaluations of a night course on George Bushery I taught last fall at U of T’s school of continuing studies.

U of T was gentle. All we really care about, they explained, is Question #15 and #22 “which rate your teaching and the course overall.”

It was hilarious. The students were kind. Apparently the quality that most defines me is “enthusiasm” and I am full of it. I attribute this to my effort to explain to them the American hard sell. I illustrated my lesson by singing the ultra-cheesy 1980s MasterCard song to the class, in the style of, oh, Petula Clark or Joey Heatherton.

“Maaaaaaaster Cardâe¦. Inter. Nation. Al. So worldly, so welcome.”

I got an ‘A’ for effort, it seems.