It Is Long Past Time for Us to Wake Up About Catholic Hospitals

Background 

Fifteen years ago, I was fascinated by prophetic commentary from a health care law expert (Amazon review of Diagnosis Critical, 10/24/2009):

Catholics may have to focus their future efforts on the creation of alternatives to acute care hospitals such as free clinics, specialized centers for reproductive medicine, and hospices for end-of-life care that could reinvigorate health care ministry (p. 19).

Earlier. an esteemed Catholic moral philosopher had even doubted whether a faithful Catholic hospital could stay afloat:

Catholic hospitals that avoid all wrongful cooperation and maintain their identity may not be economically viable. Therefore, Catholics committed to health care as an apostolate may have to look for other, better ways of carrying it on (Germain Grisez, Difficult Moral Questions, 1997).

Fast Forward

In abortion and other crimes screaming to God for justice, children are frequently the biggest losers:

In Detrans: True Stories of Escaping the Gender Ideology Cult (Margaret Mary Olohan, 2024), we are told of horrific abuses and mutilations – often to children, behind parents’ backs….

• Disability-related vulnerability is seemingly disregarded: “Children and adolescents on the autism spectrum are ‘disproportionately represented among the large, newly emerging cohort of young people self-identifying as transgender’….undiagnosed autism, particularly in girls, is contributing to the rise in transgender youth” (p. 34)….
• There is an oft-repeated, manipulative and misleading rhetorical question put to parents: “’Would you rather have a dead daughter, or a live son?’” (p. 210) (Catholic Stand, 8/7/24)

In the twenty-first century, “health care” has become increasingly bizarre and might be unrecognizable to Germain Grisez and the author of Diagnosis Critical.  Satan has confused intelligent people into believing child mutilation is “medical treatment” for gender confusion!

Nearly 150 Catholic hospitals across the United States provided children with hormone therapy or performed gender-transition surgeries on them between 2019 and 2023, contradicting Church teaching and the U.S. bishops’ prohibition on Catholic health-care providers offering such interventions,  according to data published…by a medical watchdog group. (National Catholic Register, 10/10/24)

How Are These Nonsensical Crimes Possible?

As a June 2023 response to supposed confusion in Catholic hospitals, the U.S. Catholic Bishops said that they would  incorporate their Doctrinal Note on the Moral Limits to Technological Manipulations of the Human Body into its Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services.  Especially as that incorporation has yet to happen, it appears to me that immoral delaying is taking place.

The truth is NOT inaccessible or even hard to see:

For this command which I am giving you today is not too wondrous or remote for you.

It is not in the heavens, that you should say, “Who will go up to the heavens to get it for us and tell us of it, that we may do it?”

Nor is it across the sea, that you should say, “Who will cross the sea to get it for us and tell us of it, that we may do it?”

No, it is something very near to you, in your mouth^* and in your heart, to do it.

The Choice Before Israel

See, I have today set before you life and good, death and evil.

If you obey the commandments of the LORD, your God, which I am giving you today, loving the LORD, your God, and walking in his ways, and keeping his commandments, statutes and ordinances, you will live and grow numerous, and the LORD, your God, will bless you in the land you are entering to possess.

If, however, your heart turns away and you do not obey, but are led astray and bow down to other gods and serve them,

I tell you today that you will certainly perish; you will not have a long life on the land which you are crossing the Jordan to enter and possess.

I call heaven and earth today to witness against you: I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse. Choose life, then, that you and your descendants may live,

by loving the LORD, your God, obeying his voice, and holding fast to him. For that will mean life for you, a long life for you to live on the land which the LORD swore to your ancestors, to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, to give to them (Deuteronomy 30: 11-20).

It is the responsibility of a bishop to protect his flock from inauthentic “Catholic” institutions (cf, https://www.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/motu_proprio/documents/hf_ben-xvi_motu-proprio_20121111_caritas.html). 

Conclusion

Again, it is long past time for us to wake up about Catholic hospitals.  The words of the late Germain Grisez have come to pass:

Catholics committed to health care as an apostolate…have to look for other, better ways of carrying it on.

As per Canon Law,

Can. 212 §1. Conscious of their own responsibility, the Christian faithful are bound to follow with Christian obedience those things which the sacred pastors, inasmuch as they represent Christ, declare as teachers of the faith or establish as rulers of the Church.

2. The Christian faithful are free to make known to the pastors of the Church their needs, especially spiritual ones, and their desires.

3. According to the knowledge, competence, and prestige which they possess, they have the right and even at times the duty to manifest to the sacred pastors their opinion on matters which pertain to the good of the Church and to make their opinion known to the rest of the Christian faithful, without prejudice to the integrity of faith and morals, with reverence toward their pastors, and attentive to common advantage and the dignity of persons.