To scorekeepers in the Catholic excommunication derby, it looks like it's Men-3, Women-0. Here's a recap:

1. A rogue bishop named Richard Williamson has his excommunication lifted --- before the world, and the pope, learns that he denies the Holocaust.

2. A 9-year-old Brazilian girl has an abortion. A bishop says her mother and the doctors (but not her stepfather, who allegedly raped her) are excommunicated.

3. A 73-year-old Austrian man imprisons and rapes his daughter for 24 years, lets one of their seven children die, and gets life in prison.

No one says anything. Who's making the rules here? Mad bishops and rapist fathers are in, but doctors and mothers are out? That's how it seems, at least.

The reality is that your average Catholic bishop does not get up every morning looking for someone to excommunicate. It's actually rare that a bishop --- or a pope --- pronounces a sentence of excommunication, which bars a Catholic from sacraments and a Christian burial.

Most excommunications, in fact, are self-inflicted.

Williamson, for example, knew that he could not legally be named a bishop by the breakaway Archbishop Marcel Lefevre without the Vatican's permission, but he got ordained anyway. That's an automatic excommunication, which is exactly what happened, in 1988. Pope Benedict XVI lifted Williamson's excommunication in January, along with three others, without fully knowing the extent of Williamson's wide-eyed Holocaust denial.

Then there's the tragic case of the Brazilian girl, who was allegedly raped by her 23-year-old stepfather, starting when she was just 6. Abortion is legal in Brazil in the cases of rape or threats to the mother's life. The girl had an abortion, and the next thing you know, newspapers and pundits are saying the church excommunicated the mother and the doctors involved.

Actually, no one excommunicated anyone. A bishop said the mother and the doctors "incurred excommunication" because the church teaches that direct abortion is a do-it-yourself excommunication. The technical term is "latae sententiae."

The head of the Brazilian bishops' conference now says the mother may be off the hook, because she followed doctors' advice that the pregnancy probably would have killed the girl. What about the doctors? Did the procedure save the girl's life?

Textbook answers don't help. The two scenarios where a life-saving medical procedure has the "double effect" of terminating a pregnancy --- ectopic pregnancy and cancer of the womb --- don't seem to apply here.

Yet what is the church saying about the girl's step-father rapist? Nothing. Better yet, what are the bishops saying about Austrian Josef Fritzl, the 73-year-old who kept his daughter, Elizabeth, locked in a basement prison as he fathered seven children with her, all the while living upstairs with his wife?

The answer: not a peep.

As with so many other things Catholic, it appears, rightly or wrongly, that the men's team (Williamson, the Brazilian and Austrian fathers) are "in" while the women's team (the girl's mother and the doctors) are "out."

Of course, that's not exactly the case, but that's what it looks like --- at least for anyone with access to the Internet and YouTube. The problem for the Church is that perception often equals, or supersedes, reality.

It's actually rare that a bishop --- or a pope --- pronounces a sentence of excommunication. Most excommunications, in fact, are self-inflicted.