As a Catholic academic who studies the diversity of global Catholicism, I believe the pope’s actions are significant: The pope is ratifying a practice that is already in place in much of the Catholic world; he is also broadening the possibilities for Catholic priests to show care for the laity under their charge. [...]
But as a crime, procured abortion carries with it the penalty of “latae sententiae excommunication”: that is, automatic expulsion from the Catholic Church. Only sins that are also crimes incur automatic excommunication, although one can be excommunicated through a formal process for other reasons – something that is very rarely done nowadays.
The fact that procuring an abortion is both a sin and a crime places those wanting to confess in a peculiar bind: They cannot be absolved of the sin without confessing before a priest. However, since they have been automatically excommunicated, they are denied access to the absolution of sins granted in the confessional. [...]
On one level, Pope Francis is extending a practice that has now become common in many places and making it universal throughout the Catholic Church: not all Catholic dioceses or bishops allow their priests to lift excommunication along with absolving the sin of procured abortion. As the 2009 Brazilian case makes clear, that authority is not in place in many dioceses.
But on another level, Pope Francis’s act is encouraging priests to be more sensitive to context of their parishioners’ lives, as in the case of the nine-year-old girl, and to rely less upon legalistic formulas and definitions when it comes to dealing with the complex realities of human life.
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