Jessica

Prominent Roman Catholic influencers and some leading figures in the anti-abortion movement are behaving disgracefully over the Lindsay Clancy trial. They are mocking compassion for a severely mentally ill woman, dismissing illnesses they do not understand, and turning a family’s destruction into content. It is shameful. I am a priest, not a lawyer. I am not deciding Massachusetts law or the verdict. I am speaking about the moral reality before us. Cora, Dawson, and Callan are dead. Their mother killed them. Lindsay then tried to kill herself and is now paralyzed. Mental illness does not make the children’s deaths less real, and compassion must not turn Lindsay into a celebrity. This is a tragedy from every direction. But more than one thing can be true. Lindsay was trying to get help. She went from provider to provider, reporting severe anxiety, depression, insomnia, intrusive thoughts, and thoughts of suicide. She contacted crisis services and entered a psychiatric hospital. Nineteen days after her discharge, her children were dead. Prosecution witnesses described her as a loving and devoted mother. That does not erase what she did, but it destroys the caricature of a cold mother who simply wanted her children gone. The testimony has exposed fragmented care. Providers did not always know what others knew, and records were not always available or requested. I am not saying every provider was uncaring or incompetent. But when a woman moves through this many offices, medications, and levels of psychiatric care, someone must see the whole picture. Taken together, the warning signs were everywhere. Postpartum psychosis, postpartum depression, and bipolar disorder are real. Lindsay’s precise illness and mental condition when she killed her children are contested in court. The existence of these illnesses is not. A religious following does not make someone a psychiatrist. Suffering people do not tell everyone the same things. Lindsay may have told her mother one part, her husband another, a clinician something else, and a chaplain what she could not say elsewhere. Anyone who has cared for suffering people should understand that. We do not have to choose between grieving Cora, Dawson, and Callan and recognizing that their mother was severely ill. A movement claiming to defend vulnerable life should recognize that a mentally ill woman is also vulnerable. Compassion for Lindsay takes nothing from her children. Cruelty does nothing to honor them. People on the margins have been central to my priestly service since 2008. Women in psychiatric crisis are among them. I will not turn Lindsay into a hero or pretend three children were not killed by their mother. But neither will I join a public stoning led by influencers who mistake cruelty for moral clarity. Three children should still be alive. We must ask what must change so another family does not reach the same horrifying end.