Unbelievably Un-Catholic Hospitals

**Update:  According to CNN, the hospital in question has since recanted and apologized for its attorneys' court arguments, saying, "it was 'morally wrong' to make the argument while defending itself in a wrongful death lawsuit." Good!

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Can you believe this? A supposedly Catholic hospital in Colorado has won a lawsuit by claiming that a fetus is not legally a person until it is born!

Okay, while you should be shocked, you are probably just shaking your head sadly, and are not surprised at all. But it is shameful, to say the least.

The case in Colorado involved the death of a young mother pregnant with twins (who also both died); you can read the whole story here.  Amazingly enough, Catholic Health Initiatives (the owner of the hospital) has made the official statement that

"In this case... as Catholic organizations, (we) are in union with the moral teachings of the Church."

Huh?! It’s quite difficult to reconcile the hospital’s argument that  “the fetus is not legally a person until it is born” with Church teaching which says explicitly and clearly that life begins at conception, and which upholds the dignity of the human person without respect to location inside or outside the womb.

I was surprised to find, though, that this wasn’t the first time such an argument has been made by a Catholic hospital. In 1998, according to a LifeSiteNews story,

St. Peter’s University Hospital in New Brunswick, New Jersey was reported by the Associated Press as saying that fetuses are “not persons” so as to escape a lawsuit brought by the parents of twins who died in utero.

It seems to me that the legal teams for these hospitals are simply using state laws to argue their cases in court; I suppose that is reasonable, to an extent. However, the state laws are not reflective of natural law, and they are not reflective of Catholic moral teaching. A Catholic hospital using un-Catholic laws to avoid taking responsibility for its mistakes is deplorable…but it is a “sign of the times”. Attorneys go to court to win their cases, not to stand up for what is right and good and true.

Not a person?

I have written a few times on this blog about Catholic hospitals, and the fact that they seem to be…not very Catholic at all.  As I’ve said before, I have a sneaking suspicion that there are very few truly Catholic hospitals in this nation.  To some extent, most of them have sold out to secular values or “ecumenical” views, and they sell contraceptives in their pharmacies, perform direct sterilizations, and sometimes even kill unborn babies. And even if they don’t kill babies on site, some of these hospitals employ counselors, nurses, and/or doctors who suggest such things to their patients.

Here are a few of the events that have transpired over the years that indicate the deterioration (obliteration?) of the Catholic identity of our Catholic hospitals:

·         In February of 2010, Bishop Robert F. Vasa severed the relationship of the Diocese of Baker with St. Charles Medical Center in Bend, Oregon, largely due to the fact that the hospital was performing direct sterilizations in the form of tubal ligations. The director of the hospital implied that this practice takes place in many “Catholic” hospitals – but the administrators simply do not discuss it with the local bishop.

·         Also in 2010, Bishop Thomas J. Olmsted of Phoenix, Arizona, stripped a hospital of its Catholic status because at least one abortion had been committed there.

·         A friend told me that Catholic hospital personnel suggested she abort her unborn baby solely because she was having some psycho-emotional problems.

·         A few years ago, the state of Oregon passed a law requiring hospitals to offer “emergency contraception” to rape victims, regardless of “conscience” considerations, and the bishops did nothing to fight the passage of the law.

·         In October 2007, the bishops in Connecticut decided to allow Catholic hospitals in their state to conform to government pressure to provide the “day after” pill for rape victims.

I mentioned in two previous posts (here and here) that about four years ago, I looked at every Catholic hospital or medical group website I could find on the internet. I found that many mentioned their “Catholic tradition” and also made note that they were in compliance with a document issued by the USCCB called “Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Services” (ERDs for short).  But about two years ago, in another quick survey of Catholic medical group websites, I found little mention of the ERDs.

I maintain that the secularization of Catholic hospitals was largely accomplished a number of years ago.  One reason for that is that they are not run by Catholics! I don’t know exact figures, but I’ll be you’d be hard-pressed to find more than a handful of faithful Catholics in the upper management positions of many of these hospitals, and especially in the umbrella organizations that own them, like Catholic Health Initiatives.

A year ago, I wrote a post about a news article that reported that then-Catholic HealthCare West was dropping its Catholic affiliation and changing its name to “Dignity Health”. The hospital maintained that (my emphases):

The change will have no effect on any patients or the medical care provided at the 25 Catholic and 15 secular hospitals in the system.

Really?! Then either those 25 Catholic hospitals were not adhering to the ERD’s anyway, or they were following them and were not going to change that fact with the name. I hate to be a pessimist, but I’m betting on the former. A Catholic hospital is supposed to have a Catholic identity. If dropping the Catholic affiliation doesn’t change anything about the hospital’s services and medical care provision, then it wasn’t Catholic in the first place.

I think it’s clear that we’ve lost our Catholic hospitals. The task now is to reclaim them. That’s going to be very difficult with the Obama administration working to undermine conscience rights, etc.  It will require some very strong bishops who are willing to fight for Catholic identity, not just in hospitals, but in schools, social services, and every area of society where Catholic institutions already exist.

It will require willingness to go to jail. It will require willingness to face persecution.

The Illusory Catholic Hospital - Part II

[On September 9, I posted "The Illusory Catholic Hospital, part I."]

A Catholic hospital is in the news again: LifeSiteNews reports that a “Catholic” hospital in Barcelona, Spain, admits to continuing its practice of committing abortions and vasectomies, even though the Cardinal Archbishop there has ordered it to stop doing so (see also the links to several other stories LSN has run about this hospital at the end of their article).

So, it’s not just the US that has this problem with “Catholic” hospitals, but I’ll keep my focus on American hospitals just because I have some experience with them.

Scouting around on the web, it looks to me as though most of the Catholic medical service nets in existence in this country are run by non-Catholics. That begs the question: How can an organization maintain a truly Catholic vision when the administrators are not Catholic? Frankly, I think it is unrealistic to expect that non-Catholic administrators will be able or willing to fully grasp the significance of key Catholic health teachings such as sterilization and in vitro fertilization.

In addition, it seems that most Catholics-on-the-street either don’t care or don’t pay attention to the “ethics” of a hospital – a conclusion I reached as a result of a brief stint on the Ethics Committee of the Catholic hospital in my parish. Now that was an interesting episode in my short Catholic life! Let me explain…

I was the parish secretary at the time, and sat at my desk listening to the parish priest and a religious sister discussing the hospital ethics committee. She was saying she didn’t have time to serve on the committee any longer, and he was voicing his own reluctance to take on the duty.

“I’ll do it,” I volunteered.

They both looked at me, and then at each other, and in a manner reminiscent of the old “Life” cereal commercials with little Mikey, they said, almost in unison, “Yeah! Let Jay do it!”

So I was duly appointed and approved. And I attended a grand total of two meetings. After attending that second meeting, I was "banned" from further attendance and participation. My offense? Well, in my first meeting, I questioned a Catholic doctor who was advocating for a tubal ligation for his patient. In the second meeting, I informed the (mostly non-Catholic) committee that the tubal ligations they generally approved qualified as “direct sterilization”, which was inconsistent with Church teaching. Since they were almost all non-Catholics, they were a little reluctant to grasp the concept. It didn’t help that a previous bishop had encouraged – even requested – the hospital to come up with a protocol that would allow tubal ligations under a very broad range of “exceptions”.

Prior to that second meeting, I had emailed the hospital administrator who was in charge of the ethics committee. I told him that I had researched the sterilization issue, and that there were problems with the hospital’s protocol for handling them, and that we needed to discuss this as a committee before any more decisions were made. He told me that we would discuss it “later”.

And, also prior to that second meeting, I informed our parish deacon, who served on the committee, that I was going to insist that the issue of these illicit sterilizations be discussed. He was so distressed by this prospect that he declined to even come to the meeting, and he later resigned from the ethics committee.

Well, that second meeting was very short…though to me it was an eternity, because I really don’t like confrontation, and it was a very tense meeting. I made my point about sterilization; the administrator squelched me; and then a request for a tubal ligation was presented. No one would comment because I had just said we couldn’t approve such requests. So finally, when it was clear that no one else was going to broach an opinion, I said, “Well, obviously we have to say no, because this is a direct sterilization.” Someone asked “How do you figure?” and I explained it again. The administrator decided that we would have to table the discussion, and that the meeting was adjourned. The whole thing took about 20 minutes.

It was actually a full two weeks later when the pastor of our parish told me that the hospital administrators had “banned” me from any further meetings. The priest was upset, but not about my being booted from the committee. He told me, “At least they’re not mad at me.” So although my concerns about the hospital’s practices were legitimate, I was unsupported – even castigated – by a deacon, a priest, and a “Catholic” doctor. Fortunately, Bishop Vasa did appreciate and understand the significance of the information I was able to give him, and he was able to put a stop to the wanton approval of tubal ligations.

In the final analysis, one might wonder if it is even realistic to believe a Catholic hospital is a viable concept. There simply seems not to be a demand for it. Even among the faithful themselves, those lamenting the loss of their Catholic hospital are few and far between. Since Catholics use artificial contraceptives and have themselves sterilized in the same proportions as the general population, it seems doubtful that there will be a huge outcry among these “faithful” when formerly Catholic hospitals start doing these procedures without having to justify them in some way.

So what is the “next step” for Catholic medical care? The cards are stacked against it, especially given the Obama administration’s stance on conscience clauses and health care in general; but some of those cards are, sadly, part of the Catholic deck. This suggests to me that a strong program of catechesis is necessary in order to bring errant-thinking Catholics back into the fold. Too long have the faithful been allowed – and in some cases, even taught – that it is okay to disagree with the Church on artificial contraception, sterilization, in vitro fertilization, and even abortion. In the almost ten years I have been Catholic, I have heard virtually no teaching on the evils of artificial contraception and sterilization from my parish priests. Although my experience is admittedly limited, a number of friends, acquaintances, and family members affirm my suspicion that this is not a topic anyone wants discussed. That would be tantamount to declaring that “the emperor has no clothes”.

But such a declaration must be made – and clarified – if we as Catholics want to make a serious run at the Culture of Death in this country. It is clear that some additional episcopal guidance is in order: merely withdrawing the "Catholic" designation of a hospital is not enough. A hospital stripped of its Catholic affiliation generally keeps its Catholic-sounding name (e.g., St. Charles), and might even maintain that cross on the top of its main building. With condoms and other contraceptives being sold in the pharmacy and tubal ligations and other unethical procedures being made available, uncatechized Catholics may assume Church approval in these matters.

Taking a firm stand with “Catholic” hospitals that do not comply with Church teaching is an important first step. We’ve seen a few bishops taking this step recently, and they are to be commended for it. But taking a firm stand with the faithful must be implemented as well.