The bishop conveniently left the country on a trip just days before she died Thursday.

"I think there will be repercussions from this," Gibson told ABC Radio host Sean Hannity on Wednesday.

"For a start, I mean, there's a faith community down there in Florida and they have that Bishop Lynch, who is being quite indifferent to the whole thing."

"He should be sticking up for this woman's rights and her family's rights," Gibson said. "I think he's left the country at the moment so he doesn't have to deal with it."

Bishop Lynch is currently in Indonesia surveying damage from December's tsunami.

But in a statement posted to the Web site of his St. Petersburg diocese before Easter, he didn't sound particularly upset over Schiavo's death sentence.

"At the end of the day the decision to remove Terri’s artificial feeding tube will be that of her husband, Michael," he explained. "It is he who will give the order, not the courts or certainly the governor or legislature or the medical personnel surrounding and caring for Terri. In other words, as I have said from the beginning of this sad situation, the decision will be made within a family."

Bishop Lynch called for "mediation" between Michael Schiavo and Terri's parents, saying that the 41-year-old woman's plight is a "complex and tragic situation."

The Vatican's position on Schiavo's starvation death was far stronger.

Cardinal Renato Martino, president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace in Rome, blasted the decision to kill her, in a March 7 statement:

"Without the tube, which is providing life-giving hydration and nutrition, Terri Schiavo will die. But it is not that simple. She will die a horrible and cruel death. She will not simply die; she will have death inflicted upon her over a number of terrible days, even weeks. How can anyone who claims to speak of the promotion and protection of human rights – of human life – remain silent?"

Hours after Schiavo's death was announced on Thursday, Cardinal Martino called it "murder."

"When you deprive somebody of food and water, what else is it? Nothing else but murder."

He was speaking on the case "according to the teaching of the pope."

The pope has written that food and water is not extraordinary support for life and that it cannot morally be withheld from a dying or incapacitated person.

Editor's note: