World News Korner

"You've killed two of your children. ... Not God. Not your church. Not religious devotion. You." Said by judge during sentencing of couple whose second child died due to belief in faith healing over medical treatment.

Courtesy of The Press News:

Herbert and Catherine Schaible defied a court order to get medical care for their children after their 2-year-old son, Kent, died in 2009. Instead, they tried to comfort and pray over 8-month-old Brandon last year as he, too, died of treatable pneumonia.

"My religious beliefs are that you should pray, and not have to use medicine. But because it is against the law, then whatever sentence you give me, I will accept," Catherine Schaible, 44, told the judge. She added that her beliefs have since changed.

The Schaibles are third-generation members of an insular Pentecostal community, the First Century Gospel Church in northeast Philadelphia, where they also taught at the church school. They have seven surviving children.
Judge Benjamin Lerner rejected defense claims that their religious beliefs "clashed" with the 2011 court order to get annual checkups and call a doctor if a child became ill. The order came after a jury convicted them of involuntary manslaughter in Kent's death, and they were sentenced to 10 years of probation.

"April of 2013 wasn't Brandon's time to die," Lerner said, noting the violence committed throughout human history in the name of religion. "You've killed two of your children. ... Not God. Not your church. Not religious devotion. You."

Experts say about a dozen U.S. children die in faith-healing cases each year.

The Schaibles are the rare couple to lose a second child that way. Their pastor, Nelson Clark, blamed Kent's death on a "spiritual lack" in the parents' lives, and insisted they would never seek medical care, even if another child was dying.

"It was so foreseeable to me that this was going to happen," said Assistant District Attorney Joanne Pescatore, who prosecuted both cases. "Everybody in the system failed these children."

After the first death, she and public defender Mythri Jayaraman agreed that the couple's beliefs were so ingrained that their children remained at risk. They asked the earlier judge to have the family supervised by a Department of Human Services caseworker. Instead, the judge assigned them to probation officers, who are not trained to monitor children's welfare.

Pescatore has called Brandon's symptoms "eerily similar" to Kent's. They included labored breathing and a refusal to eat.

In his police statement last year, Herbert Schaible, 45, said, "We believe in divine healing, that Jesus shed blood for our healing and that he died on the cross to break the devil's power."

When people ask me what harm can faith do, this is the kind of thing that I think should be brought up time and time again. The idea that illness is the result of demonic power, and that the only way to cure it is through faith, is an archaic superstition which should not have purchase in this modern age.

And yet here it is.

However what is almost as big of a travesty is that the judge only gave this couple a sentence of three and a half to seven years, even though the third degree murder charge they were convicted on could have resulted in 40 years behind bars.

Now they will simply be out someday to usher in the death of a third child, whose only sin will to have been born to a pair of simple minded parents, whose superstitious beliefs are so fundamental to their personalities that they will blame his death on an imaginary devil rather than accept any responsibility.

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