By Michelle Martin
Staff writer

The state of health care, the church and American society as a whole would be diminished if Catholic hospitals and other health organizations were to lose their religious identity, health care leaders were told June 9.

Peter Steinfels, a religion and ethics columnist for the New York Times and author of “A People Adrift: The Crisis in the Roman Catholic Church in America,” urged participants in the Catholic Health Association’s 89th assembly to cling to their Catholic roots.

About 1,100 leaders of Catholic health organizations gathered June 6-9 in Chicago for the assembly, which was organized around the theme of ethics.

The Catholic Church has historically made itself known in American society through health care, social services and educational institutions, Steinfels said. While such institutions were originally formed by and to serve an immigrant Catholic population, they now serve diverse groups with diverse staffs.

Catholic health care providers have a particularly long history of reaching beyond religious boundaries, offering services in municipal and public hospitals, almshouses, prisons and orphanages throughout the 19th century, he said.

While the sisters who traditionally provided such services sometimes faced anti-Catholic prejudices, discrimination evaporated quickly in the face of typhoid or yellow fever outbreaks, Steinfels said.

For their part, the sisters provided care with sensitivity to the religious sensibilities of their non-Catholic patients, he said.

“They were doing pluralism at the bedside long before it was explicated in the seminaries or thought of in the Vatican,” Steinfels said.

At the same time, they brought Catholic thought about birth and death, sickness and healing to their ministry, leading to a touch of the human and divine in the treatment of people at critical points in their lives.

The world of health care would be diminished if that were to end, Steinfels said.

“Catholic health care has been endowed with teachings, models, disciplines and symbols that have nourished those gifts,” Steinfels said. “Those gifts are threatened by the science, the technology, the hyper-efficiency and the bottom line.”

At the same time, health care institutions provide a way to make concrete the healing mission of the church, and give the church credibility when it discusses medical ethics, life issues and the new questions raised by genetic technologies.

“Catholic health care has been in the very eye of the storm,” Steinfels said. “What would be lost if suddenly every Catholic hospital and medical center suddenly ceased to be Catholic? ... It is of the utmost importance that you do not allow that to happen.”

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