Helping the Poor Deemed Not Good Enough

Deacon Greg points us today towards a NY Times headline about St Vincent's Hospital in Manhattan, the last Catholic hospital standing in NYC. Today that last bastion of Catholic Healthcare in the urban jungle is in danger of closing.

“We are not going away,” said Sister Jane Iannucelli, vice chairwoman of the hospital board, standing in the light of the stained glass windows.

“One of the things that’s so crucial to the Sisters of Charity is serving the poor,” she said after the Mass.

It was that very calling, some industry executives suggested, that may have helped make the hospital obsolete.

“Helping the poor is indeed the mission and the cause célèbre,” said Kenneth E. Raske, president of the Greater New York Hospitals Association, a trade group. “Therein lies the dilemma.”

While other hospitals emphasize high-tech care and rush to invest in the fancy equipment and celebrity doctors that attract patients with the means to pay for them, St. Vincent’s stuck to its motto of “compassionate care,” rooted in its origins as a place that trained nurses and that was under the auspices of nuns.

As the Village changed, becoming home to middle-class and affluent families, by many accounts St. Vincent’s failed to change with it. In 2007, several years after an ill-fated merger with other Catholic hospitals, St. Vincent’s management proposed to begin selling off its maze of outdated buildings around Seventh Avenue and 12th Street to build a new, state of the art high-rise building across the street, to be designed by Pei Cobb Freed & Partners Architects, famous for cutting-edge projects like the glass pyramid expansion of the Louvre museum in Paris and the John Hancock Tower in Boston.

But some said it was too late.

It's a sin when helping the poor is shoved aside in favor of vanity--for lack of a better term. It seems that money is given to the places with the latest cutting edge tools while meanwhile an underserved population --who is probably unwanted in that neighborhood these days--are left to fend for themselves.

That, in a word, is shameful.

Read here for more.

Who will anoint the sick and the dying?

Deacon Greg asks this important question...and gives this example from the Washington Post

"He said 'I'm a dying man, and I want to see a priest,'" Mary Baus remembered. "All they said was that they didn't have one."

Baus survived, but his wife said it was a traumatic event that left both her and her husband shaken.

"There used to be a chaplain available if you needed him," she said. "Or you could get a priest to come to the hospital. Now it's not for sure that you will see anyone."

Finding a priest to be at the bedside of the dying is becoming harder and harder across the country. The shortage of priests has been a problem for years, but its implications become most clear at dire times for the ill.

I agree with Deacon Greg who says that Deacons would be great here to use as ministers of the sacrament. My thought is perhaps even a new clerical position intentionally called "chaplain" that could administer anointing of the sick and the Eucharist only--a bet a lot of Catholic doctors would sign up.

It's an important position. I remember when I worked in Calvary Hospital as a volunteer with pastoral care, all people really wanted was someone to talk to and someone who could pray with them in their dark moments. It would have been great to have some kind of ritual that we could have done together on a regular basis at a moment's notice or to be able to administer the anointing of the sick. I'm sure it's a question that will come up at the med school with me often. It's going to take the laity to really speak up about this.

So what are you waiting for? Start writing your letters to the local bishop or to the USCCB.

Catholicism Under Attack

Catholic Mom has acquired this interesting piece from Sherry Antonetti

Currently, practicing Catholicism is under assault by the law. In 2004, the California Supreme Court ruled Catholic Charities was not entitled to an exception the law grants to churches or “religious employers.”

Because Catholic Charities assists people of all faiths, it is not a “religious employer,” the court said. The group is therefore distinct from a church that is formed to promote religion, the court ruled. Catholic hospitals had to allow their employees to acquire birth control. The court in Massachusetts mandated that Catholic Charities facilitate adoptions to gay and lesbian couples, causing the charity to pull out of providing adoptions in the state.

In the past few years, in over fifteen states, legislatures have crafted laws demanding that Catholic hospitals administer RU-486 as a post trauma means of birth control to victims of sexual assault, claiming that such medications have no abortive effects but are merely a safety precaution against unwanted pregnancy.

The fact that the Church believes it to be a means of abortion is deemed irrelevant by these states. In other words, the Church can say whatever it wants, but in practice, it must abide what the state will tolerate with respect to how its surrogates live out that faith in active mission work. These same states have also declared the moral objections of the Church and those working to manifest the mission of the Church, to be irrelevant to the health needs of the individual being treated.

Now here is something that I think the Bishops, and we, as laity, who are also hospital consumers, can have a huge voice in which we state our moral opinions. The issue will be raised that when it comes to health care, time is of the essence--so will patients who are brought to the closest hospital which happens to be Catholic after a sexual assault be upset that we won't issue an abortive pill in those instances as a precaution? States seem to already be demanding that Catholic hospitals need to comply--so a huge moral question is that if that's so does the Catholic hospital call the state's bluff and shut down and then if they do--does a more secular group simply take up ownership and the hospital continues to maintain business as usual, albeit without Catholic principles at the helm? Or does the state allow the hospitals to be run as the church wishes and upholds their right to run the hospital the way they wish.

I do a lot of traveling and I see a lot of other religious traditions beginning to open hospitals all around this great land of ours--including those who agree with us on these issues. I wonder if they address these issues as well? Anybody know?

It seems that we also have a divide of unusual proportions here. Republicans would say that the state has no right to tell the Catholic hospitials what they can and cannot do and would not wish that the state interferes. It's a private hospital would be their stance.

But with the trend seeming towards universal health care--something that perhaps many Catholics would see as providing a very necessary and much-needed service for the poor, would that exempt Catholic hospitals from participating in a government-run health care initiative and thus become hosptials only for the elite who could afford them? Or if they do serve the needs of the poor is that going to put them in a financial predicament that may force them to close up shop?

Seems to me that cooler heads need to prevail on the state's side here. They should indeed grant exemptions for the hospital to have to participate in any medical procedure that would go against the teachings of the church.

But that's me talking--what do others think?