LAMPEDUSA, Italy (CNS) -- For more than 30 years, Dr. Pietro Bartolo said he has examined more than 350,000 people and performed postmortem examinations on those who died making the crossing to Lampedusa, where migrants rescued from the Mediterranean first arrived.One story, he said, has stayed with him.After a shipwreck near Malta, a father told Bartolo how he had tried to keep his family alive in the water. He held his youngest child against his chest, his wife with one hand and his 3-year-old son with the other as he swam. When he realized he no longer had the strength to save everyone, he let go of his older son."'If I had held on for one more minute, my son would still be here,'" Bartolo recalled the father telling him. Rescue crews arrived moments later."Understand," Bartolo said in an interview with Catholic News Service June 3, "how terrible it is that a father has to choose which child to let go."Stories like this, he said, explain why Pope Leo XI

VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- The Vatican declared July 2 that the six bishops involved in the Society of St. Pius X's unauthorized episcopal consecrations had incurred automatic excommunication and said its clergy "are in schism and therefore must be considered schismatics."The decree from Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández, prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, marks the strongest Vatican action against the traditionalist society since its founder, Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, consecrated four bishops without papal approval in 1988, leading to similar Vatican censure.While the society claims it was compelled to ordain new bishops July 1 in Ecône, Switzerland in order to guarantee to celebrate what they consider the true Mass, Vatican officials and scholars say the dispute that culminated in the excommunications has never primarily been about the traditional Latin Mass.Founded in 1970 by French Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre in opposition to reforms fo