By JAMES ASHER, DO
PHOENIX — Members of the Catholic Medical Association of Phoenix — a component organization of the Catholic Medical Association — recently received a letter from their chaplain announcing that as of March 19, St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center here had been granted permission to reserve the Blessed Sacrament and begin having daily Mass.
In addition, a new Collaborative Mission Committee between St. Joseph’s, Common Spirit Health, Creighton University, and the Diocese of Phoenix had been formed.
The purpose of the committee among other things was to “ensure that…important medical ministries of the Diocese of Phoenix are working within the ethical and religious guidelines of the Church.” It was further noted that “the process of the Diocese of Phoenix restoring St. Joseph’s status as a Catholic hospital is ongoing.” Reference was made to the “continuing . . . reconciliation process between the diocese . . . and St. Joseph’s Hospital.”
My immediate reaction was: well, stranger things have happened, and good luck with that. The disheartening feelings that come with the chaplain’s letter are not just about St. Joe’s, but what is suspected to be going on with many other Catholic institutions. A little background might serve to illustrate the pessimism, which I don’t think is exclusively mine.
Medical Ethics
And St. Joseph’s
Prior to the Wuhan virus pandemic, the Catholic Medical Association had scheduled the annual “boot camp” meeting and retreat this June, for American medical students and residents at Mundelein Seminary north of Chicago. In past years, some 30 to 50 young physicians in training have gathered for this intense study of Catholic medical ethics with professors of medicine and philosophy from across the country. Tuition and most costs of this weeklong event are paid for by donations from CMA members.
The association also hosts an annual convention — this year in September in San Diego — featuring speakers covering a variety of issues relating to the spirituality and ethics of patient care. Some students and residents will be able to attend one or more of these meetings.
The currently important ethical considerations include contraception, sterilization, abortion, infanticide, in-vitro/embryo manipulation, gender “reassignment,” allowing terminal patients to die naturally, assisted suicide, euthanasia, the necessity for brain death prior to vital organ transplantation, and other elements of the Culture of Death.
Other than the minuscule contributions to ethical training of physicians made by the CMA, the remaining 26,000 graduating medical students each year will pretty much have to get Catholic medical ethics on their own, if they are to get it at all. What they will almost all receive from their formal training: If it’s legal and the patient wants it, he gets it. You have no right to interfere, and your conscience is inconsequential.
These students will also graduate without ever taking the Hippocratic Oath — and this has been so since the early 1970s. What they will call an oath will be a vacuous something made up by the class so as not to offend anyone.
It is important to note that Catholic medical ethics is based on a philosophical treatment of natural law. It stands on its own quite well without any theological support. Hence, for example, killing an innocent person is wrong and violates natural law, irrespective of one’s religion.
Therefore, the widespread but false belief that Catholics are attempting to impose their religion on others in the application of natural-law medical ethics has influenced our whole society to question fundamental moral rightness and wrongness. Pretty much gone, too, it seems, is the sense or awareness that the well-formed conscience of the doctor is one of the most important facets of her mind offered at the bedside.
Thus, we are now surrounded by medical providers without any meaningful — natural law — training in medical ethics, and it has been this way for years.
St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center in Phoenix lost its Catholic identity some 10 years ago over unrepented medical-ethical violations. This loss was not accompanied by any appreciable wailing of tears or gnashing of teeth from the medical community. Indeed, it seemed to be business usual, and no reaction or movement to change anything.
So it should come as no surprise that when Chaplain Fr. Ignatius Mazanowski, FFHS, wrote to his Catholic Medical Association of Phoenix members that efforts were under way to bring St. Joseph’s Hospital back into the Catholic fold, there was no huge outpouring of enthusiasm. Oh, sure, God can accomplish all things, and there’s great hope, and Father asked for prayers. But the obstacles seem quite daunting.
Like What?
Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Healthcare Services (ERDs) are the U.S. bishops’ document that guides health-care ethics under Catholic auspices. In 2009, ongoing sterilization procedures, and an abortion authorized by administrator Sr. Margaret McBride, RSM, were brought to the attention of Phoenix Bishop Thomas Olmsted.
To these clear violations of the ERDs, response was swift: McBride’s latae sententiae — that is, automatic — excommunication for formal cooperation with an abortion was confirmed, and Catholic Healthcare West, the management corporation for the hospital now known as Common Spirit Health, was offered three stipulations to keep St. Joe’s Catholic: There would be no more violations of the ERDs, there would be committees set up to oversee pathology specimens and other activities to ensure compliance, and all affected personnel would receive regular ERD training.
This offer was refused, and St. Joe’s was no longer Catholic.
That was 2010. Little has changed, and there is no obvious reason why anything would change. Common Spirit clearly places the bottom line above any pretense of adherence to the ERDs. Sr. McBride, whose excommunication was lifted in 2011, remains as an administrator working with Common Spirit Health.
Since it’s likely that the majority of the St. Joseph staff doctors have had little training in the arguments of natural law as it relates to the practice of medicine, they would seem, therefore, mostly untroubled by the sort of things that got the hospital into problems with the diocese in the first place. Thus, they are unlikely to push now for Catholic moral compliance. Why should they? Life is good.
Physician professional organizations such as the AMA, American Osteopathic Association, and American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists would, of course, encourage their members to vigorously oppose anything like a change back to following Catholic medical ethics.
St. Joe’s is a large teaching institution with some 100 senior medical students from the University of Arizona, Creighton University, and elsewhere in the United States. Should the students demand natural-law bioethical training, it would almost certainly happen — students today tend to get whatever they want — and they would begin to see the conflicts in their present training curriculum.
They will not ask for it; they likely don’t even know it exists.
Then there is federal and state government opposition to Catholic morality, not to mention liberal, agenda-driven courts and the potential for lawsuits with disgruntled patients for whom abortion, sterilization, or other condemned acts would be denied.
But even if physicians or St. Joe’s wanted to practice according to strict Catholic teaching, there would be scant support from the majority of Catholic-identifying patients, who would mostly favor contraception, access to abortion, sterilization, in-vitro fertilization, and all what’s left in the Culture of Death. Which is almost certainly true of most patients who have left the Church, let alone those many served by the hospital with no Catholic connection.
Any Real Hope?
Perhaps the awareness of the students could be enhanced to make them want real ethical training, and this would begin to infuse St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center with a renewed Catholic vigor reminiscent of the enthusiasm of the first Sisters of Mercy upon their arrival in Phoenix in 1882. One would hope the Jesuit influence from a growing Creighton presence here would weigh in heavily on ERD training and environment for its students.
In the meantime, St. Joe’s, and likely many other hospitals throughout the U.S., continue on, with the former or undeserved name of Catholic, their transgressions against moral law ignored or deplored.
Pray for courageous bishops, and for Catholic health care, pray for the Catholic Medical Association. If your doctor is a Catholic, tell her that her well-formed conscience matters and encourage her membership in the CMA. Tell her that the few doctors practicing according to strict Catholic moral teaching are eagerly sought after by faithful Catholics, and are doing very well.
If we see truly Catholic hospitals once again, it will be when more Catholics — lay, professional, and consecrated — insist on them.
(Asher, vice president of the Catholic Medical Association of Phoenix, is a graduate of Marquette University and Des Moines University, with his residency at the University of Nebraska Medical Center. He holds a certificate in bioethics from the National Catholic Bioethics Center, Philadelphia, and an MA in bioethics from Midwestern University. He and his wife, Rose Neidhoefer of Milwaukee, have seven adult children.)
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