Health Care with a Conscience
James C. Capretta reports in the New Atlantis:
. . . And yet, despite this long history of service to communities in every region of the country, as well as continued financial strength, the future of Catholic health care in the United States is far from assured because of the wide cultural divide between secular elites and those motivated by religious conviction. The same principles and ideals that move Catholic hospitals to care for the weakest and neediest also move them to oppose abortion, sterilization, and other practices at the juncture of medicine and morality. And at that juncture, Catholic hospitals are running into an increasingly hostile public health establishment with very different values. It is simply incomprehensible to many people in positions of power in both the public and private sectors that the same vision that inspires widely-respected compassionate care would also compel closure or sale of a facility to avoid complicity in providing abortions—yet that is just the difficult choice some Catholic health facilities have faced . . .