St. Charles Medical Center in Bend and the Catholic Church have ended their 92-year partnership. The church could no longer tolerate the hospital’s practices regarding reproductive services, including contraception, but mainly tubal ligation or female sterilization.
St. Charles’s parent company, Cascade Healthcare Community, also operates facilities in Redmond, Madras and Prineville. Historically, St. Charles was a leader of the counter-Reformation.
It’s not lost on many women that the beef between the church and the hospital is over the church’s control of women’s lives. Ironically, women are the mainstay of the Catholic Church even as it denies them what they had centuries ago: leadership positions within the church. This is not a recipe for growth of the church.
Now, the church thinks it can grow by subtracting itself from the largest hospital east of the Cascades. It seems counter-intuitive.
Also, will nuns still be allowed to provide aid and comfort at the hospital? Afterall, it’ll still be called St. Charles.
St. Charles is a "non-profit" hospital, but it still likes to make money. Expanding services in reproductive health is a way to make more money. And that's always the bottom line.
Left unsaid on the TV newscasts was the big issue: abortion. The newspaper did address this issue at the end of its article. It is almost certain that abortions will be performed more openly at St. Charles. The secret in Bend was that abortions, in some capacity, have been performed there for years.
Like war, abortion has always been a part of our world and likely always will. It’s not pleasant, but that’s the way it is.
It's also not lost on many women AND men that there seems to be a willful ignorance on the part of many to inform themselves of the facts, but who rather prefer to vent the spleen at any straw "person" within firing range. And of course, being the biggest player on the field, the railing against the Catholic Church is a favorite indoor sport of people who like to hide behind their anonymity. So much for personal integrity.
ReplyDeleteUnlike hospitals, whose change from the Christian model of healing and compassion to the cut-throat business model of profit sets up a direct conflict of interest with the patient's interests, the Church has no more interest in controlling anyone's lives...any more than you have a desire to "control" the lives of your children by forbidding them to play in the middle of the freeway. That's presuming, of course, that you actually have children instead of selfishly aborting or contracepting them out of existence.
The notion that women ever held leadership positions in the Church is complete hooey. Not one shred of objectively verifiable evidence has ever been proven, apart from one or two very rare, temporary cases centuries ago. And for very good reason. It is not the Church that "denies" them leadership positions (your term): it is Christ Himself. Not one of the Twelve was female, nor is there any evidence that "the 72" disciples sent out to preach were women. Women exercise an extraordinarily privileged role in the Church: it is they alone who share directly in the bearing and nurturing of life. What role could be more important than that? Women degrade their inherent dignity by trying to be like men.
> "Not a recipe for church growth"? You seem to be ignorant of the facts:
VATICAN CITY, Feb 20, 2010 (CNA) .- The number of Catholics worldwide rose by 19 million from 2007 to 2008 according to the Vatican almanac presented to the Pope on Saturday morning. The 2010 "Annuario Pontifico," or Pontifical Yearbook, which offers a variety of other statistics concerning religious and lay faithful in the Universal Church, also reports an increase in seminarians.
> "Now, the church thinks it can grow by subtracting itself from the largest hospital east of the Cascades."
The Church has no desire to "subtract" itself from the hospital: it was a matter of integrity. The Board of Directors for years had been lying to the Church about their compliance with explicit ethical directives forbidding the gravely immoral practices such as tubal ligation. Whether you agree or not is immaterial: it is objectively immoral, and highly fraudulent for the Board to continue to represent itself as compliant with the DIRECTIVES - not suggestions, not guidelines, not recommendations. Furthermore, the bishop had adopted them as statutory law for all Catholic health care agencies under his jurisdiction. Since the Board was found to have repeatedly lied and was unwilling to reform its practices, the only choice left to the bishop was to impose the canonical penalty of withdrawing the designation "Catholic" from the facility, along with all that that implies.
> "Also, will nuns still be allowed to provide aid and comfort at the hospital? After all, it’ll still be called St. Charles."
The "nuns", as you call them, left decades ago, turning the management over to laymen. And we can see what happened as a result, can't we?
> "Left unsaid on the TV newscasts was the big issue: abortion....The secret in Bend was that abortions, in some capacity, have been performed there for years."
And precisely for that reason - the objective acts of sacrilege committed by killing innocent and defenseless children on property that had been blessed and consecrated to the Christian apostolate of healing - was what led to the inevitable decision. This is nothing less than fraud on a grand scale.
And God will not be mocked.
Sincerely,
Arsenius