P.S. Your Excellency: Could any of our grandparents have imagined that -
by the dawn of 2015 - it would be routine for Catholic hospitals to be overwhelmingly staffed by OBGYNs who are NOT NFP-only? Could our grandparents have imagined that
unsuspecting individuals could check Catholic hospital web sites for private contact info of providers of morally excluded
services? Back in 1997's
The Way of the Lord Jesus, Vol III (which is available online in its entirety), Germain Grisez provided a fascinating reflection on "Catholic" hospitals and their prospects for remaining truly Catholic:
"to be an apostolate that carries on Jesus’ ministry of mercy, Catholic
hospitals must not only deliver quality health care but provide service
to 'the poorest and most abandoned of the sick,' give religious
instruction and encouragement along with health care, explicitly
evangelize, strive to humanize medical practice, fully conform to the
Church’s moral teaching, and supply sound formation in that teaching. Of
course, even isolated individuals’ work in the field of health care can
qualify as a lay apostolate, in the same way as other morally
acceptable occupations Christians might undertake, if carried out in a
way that struggles against the evils that afflict such work and restores
it in the light of the gospel, manifests Christian mercy, and bears
clear witness to faith (see AA 5–7; LCL, 102–13). However,
Catholic hospitals will have lost their identity unless they meet all
the conditions for carrying on Jesus’ mission of mercy 275....
"doing God’s will and entirely avoiding wrongdoing are at the heart of
anything that can be called an apostolate. Do not regard actions such as
sterilization and abortion merely as forbidden procedures and do not
think of wrongful cooperation with them merely as rule breaking, to be
avoided if possible. Recognize such acts as grave injuries to persons or
their very destruction, and thus contrary to Christian love and
entirely incompatible with your apostolate....
"If a Catholic hospital is to carry on its work as an apostolate, its
board members and administrators should deal with formal cooperation in
various evils by its personnel. If those responsible instead studiously
avoid noticing such formal cooperation or decide to tolerate it, they at
least materially cooperate in it in a way that hardly can be justified.
As a community committed to an apostolate, the hospital will have
betrayed itself even if its board members and administrators manage to
stop just short of letting its own complicity in evil become formal
cooperation.
"Material cooperation with wrongdoing can be scandalous in the strict
sense: It can lead people to sin by encouraging them in rationalization
and self-deception (which do not free them of guilt) regarding the
wrongdoing. The scandal would not be prevented by a Catholic
institution’s prohibition of morally unacceptable procedures within the
domain remaining to it, even if that policy is well publicized. For to
most non-Catholics and many Catholics the material cooperation would
seem to imply that those procedures are not wrong in themselves but
merely forbidden to Catholics, as eating meat on Friday used to be.
Moreover, other things being equal, a Catholic institution’s material
cooperation is much more likely to be scandalous than an individual
Catholic’s. The institution’s acts are presumed to be fully deliberate
and free, not the product of ignorance or weakness, as an individual’s
might be. And since the institution claims to be distinguished from
others by being Catholic, whatever it does is taken by many
non-Catholics and even unsophisticated Catholics to be the Church’s own
act.
"In various ways, a Catholic institution’s significant, obvious,
voluntary cooperation in wrongdoing inevitably will impair and probably
even negate its capacity to provide credible witness. For example,
commingled with the service of secularized providers, its activities
will become less identifiable and less distinctively Catholic. Again,
the closer association with health care providers whose practice
violates moral norms taught by the Church often will make it harder for a
Catholic institution’s administrators and staff to speak out for the
truth of those norms and work against their violation....For those engaged in health
care as an apostolate to impair their witness in these and other ways
would be utterly self-defeating, since, to repeat, the essence of
apostolate is not only to promote a human good such as health but to
practice Christian love and bear witness to the gospel’s truth,
including love for the tiniest and the most debilitated of Jesus’
sisters and brothers, and the moral truths regarding how they are to be
dealt with."
