An Italian priest sent to minister to baby Alfie Evans as he is fighting for his life has been removed from Alder Hey Hospital.
A report from Italian newspaper La Nuova Bussola suggests Father Don Gabriele Brusco was removed from Alfie’s bedside by Liverpool Archbishop Malcolm McMahon after hospital staff grew tired of the priest’s presence. Father Brusco, while stationed at the hospital to tend to Alfie, was reportedly reminding medical staffers that God is aware of their choices during this trying time. “While at the hospital, the priest appealed to the consciences of the hospital staff, reminding them that God would judge them for their sins against Alfie’s life,” reported Life Site News. “Apparently, the staff did not like this.”
Life Site News has confirmed through a source close to the family that Father Brusco is no longer at Alder Hey Hospital, where baby Alfie remains.
The Italian report suggests ties between “the Catholic bishops of England and the Establishment represented by doctors and judges,” notes Life Site News. McMahon has voiced his support for the Alder Hey medical team, which has decided that a boy yet to see his second birthday must be essentially starved to death in their hospital after sustaining his own life void of life-support for over 30 hours rather than seek further treatment in Italy.
“I am grateful for the medical and chaplaincy care which Alfie is receiving,” McMahon told The Tablet, a U.K.-based left-leaning Catholic outlet. “I know that they are doing everything that is humanly possible,” he said, adding, “I know that our medical and legal systems in the UK are also based on compassion and the safeguarding of the rights of the individual child.”
McMahon took a meeting with Pope Francis and reportedly fed the pontiff “a pile of lies” that eventually lead to Father Brusco’s forced removal, suggests Italian reporter Benedetta Frigerio.
Frigerio “observed that although McMahon could not cover the seven kilometres between his residence and the hospital to visit the Catholic child and his parents, he could find time to fly to Rome. She suggested, acerbically, that the archbishop had fed the pontiff ‘a pile of lies,'” says the report from Life Site News. “La Nuova Bussola, an Italian Catholic newspaper, is reporting that before McMahon went to Rome, his auxiliary bishop, Thomas Williams, telephoned Brusco and quizzed him for an hour and three-quarters about his presence at Alder Hey. After this, Father Brusco ‘remained at his post.’ However, after McMahon’s visit to Rome yesterday, ‘Vatican support began to falter’ and Cardinal Nichols, through his auxiliary, Bishop John Francis Sherrington, wrote to the priest, asking him to return to his parish in London.”
Baby Alfie continues to fight for his life with no help from the British court system or Alder Hey Hospital and now without a priest at his bedside.