In the 1950s a Catholic hospital was unquestionably Catholic in both policy and design. Staffed mostly in those days by a medical order of nuns in traditional habits, these hospitals also contained real chapels decorated with striking, memorable iconography.
Philadelphia’s Nazareth Hospital, designed by my grandfather Frank V. Nickels in 1940, was famous for its chapel that attracted visitors from all over the city. People would visit Nazareth just to visit the chapel with its stunning mosaics, altar and marble work.
In 2001, Nazareth Hospital was incorporated into the Trinity Health Mid-Atlantic orbit, the largest Catholic healthcare system serving Philadelphia. Trinity Health, which is sponsored by Catholic Health Ministries (CHM), eventually demolished the hospital’s traditional chapel and in its place installed a generic Meditation Room.
“The Meditation Room, located on the second floor across from the cafeteria, is available for prayer, meditation, yoga, aromatherapy, and relaxation,” the hospital’s website proudly states, adding, “Muslim prayer rugs and various sacred texts are available.”
Nazareth is now a prime example of the new Catholic hospital, where Muslim prayers rugs are offered in the same space where the Mass was celebrated, where yoga and aromatherapy take place where there used to be an altar, and where a variety of so called “sacred texts” are available. (Don’t be surprised if the Bhagavad gita and Dianetics by E. Ron Hubbard are part of the collection.)
But aside from the visual changes in Catholic hospitals – where there’s not even a crucifix to indicate the place is Catholic -there’s been an “interior” policy revolution that matches the conversion of real chapels into Meditation Rooms.
A big part of that policy revolution involves gender-transition surgeries.
The National Catholic Register (NCR) recently reported that:
“Nearly 150 Catholic hospitals across the United States provided children with hormone therapy or performed gender-transition surgeries on them between 2019 and 2023, contradicting Church teaching and the U.S. bishops’ prohibition on Catholic health-care providers offering such interventions.”
NCR quoted a EWTN News report that found “doctors at Catholic hospitals wrote more than 1,850 prescriptions for minors to facilitate a gender transition,” as in testosterone to girls and estrogen to boys.
These offenses occurred in clear violation of a 2023 U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) prohibition against altering one’s physical characteristics for a “gender transition.” The Catholic bishops stated such actions did “not respect the fundamental order of the human person as an intrinsic unity of body and soul, with a body that is sexually differentiated.”
The USCCB document even quoted Pope Francis’s 2016 apostolic exhortation Amoris Laetitia:
“Beyond the understandable difficulties which individuals may experience, the young need to be helped to accept their own body as it was created.”
The push for gender-transition hormone therapy treatments and surgeries in Catholic hospitals can be traced to the Catholic Hospital Association (CHA), which is comprised of more than 600 hospitals and 1600 health centers and long term care facilities throughout the United States.
CHA has a history of fighting with US Catholic bishops. In 2013, the group clashed with USCCB over contraception and abortion provisions in the Affordable Care Act.
The Catholic hospital gender-transition data reported by NCR and EWTN comes from Do No Harm, an organization founded in 2022 to protect minors from gender ideology and patients and physicians from “woke healthcare.”
CHA took issue with Do No Harm’s 2024 report, which indicates just how radical CHA has become over the years since its “reproductive rights” clash with US Catholics bishops over the Affordable Care Act.
“A preliminary review of the data gathered by Do No Harm indicates they are irresponsibly presenting claims data without necessary clinical context,” the statement from CHA read. “This harmful report makes dangerous assumptions that seek to disparage health care providers and the patients they treat.”
At first glance this statement sounds like scores of other woke blather from organizations that support the genital mutilation of children. It might be said to be the official language of abortion providers when called to defend the indefensible. CHA stated Do No Harm was out to “disparage health care providers and the patients they treat…”
CHA then doubled down and accused Do No Harm-and NCR by default for publishing the data- of “stigmatizing LGBTQ communities” while maintaining that CHA “recognizes and upholds the human dignity of each person.”
It might be helpful to ask: what’s ethical about providing gender-transition treatments to minors and children?
Are their really small children who identify as LGBTQ, and do they really make up tiny tot rainbow flag communities?
In a rather milquetoast nod towards old school Catholic values, CHA asserted “there are certain procedures we do not perform based on our values and faith.”
Is CHA talking about euthanasia?
If anything, Do No Harm’s data on gender-transition procedures for children in Catholic hospitals was an under-count. A spokesperson for the group said their database does not include cash payments or insurance claims.
America magazine, the world’s premier far left Jesuit journal, sounded alarm bells in 2023 when the U.S.C.C.B. formalized bans on transgender surgeries and hormonal interventions in Catholic hospitals.
The U.S.C.C. B. document, Doctrinal Note on the Moral Limits to Technological Manipulation of the Human Body, caused other far left Catholic journals, like the National Catholic Reporter, to complain that the U.S. bishops “new statement on trans health care lacks sound science and trans voices.”
When Catholic publications start sounding like the Village Voice or The Atlantic, you know the meaning of ‘Catholic’ has changed. And while radical milestones like this may tickle the fancy of Church progressives, the larger question still looms: what to do with Catholic hospitals that consistently disobey the bishops?
One answer, of course, is to strip contrarian Catholic hospitals of their Catholic status.
But that’s easier said than done.
A recent Maclver Institute for Public Policy report ran the following headline: “Bishops Shrug Off Reports of Catholic Hospitals Conducting Sex-Changes on Children.”
Connect the dots: First they came for the chapels, then they took away the crucifixes, and then they got into the child-mutilation business.
https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-moral-disintegration-of-catholic-hospitals/