11 February, 2010

The good that the Church does

If you click on the title to this post, you will find yourself reading an article which points out that fully 25% of all the health care institutions in the world are owned and run by the Catholic Church. In these days when people are so likely to point out the sins and errors of the Church, it's good to be reminded of the good that it does as well.
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2 comments:

  1. At Santa Monica Hospital, near me, a Catholic facility, they closed the doors for a few weeks, supposedly to repair damage after the Northridge earthquake, about 15 years ago. When they reopened, they were a Healthcare center, by subscription only. They don't take the indigent, they don't take Medicare, they don't take MediCal. They don't accept walk ins or paramedic runs in their emergency room. They only take select insurance coverage and all patents must be prequalified and have membership cards.

    The rest of he Catholic facilities in SoCal are not that extreme. They have kicked out the nuns that founded them and formed dummy, non profit corporations to benefit the Church and it's friends, where before, these institutions were the property of the Nursing Orders that founded them. The old nuns are not even allowed to work there anymore.

    The CEOs of these new corporatons are old White Catholic men that make salaries in excess of a million dollars a year. Few of these faciities have any outreach to the poor community at all. They encourage these patients to seek care at State and County facilities.

    These facilities want to make a big stink about not providing birth control to employees or benefits to same sex domestic partners. They of course will not do abortions or elective tubal ligation after a birth for women who decide they've had enough children. Ya know what's funny? None of the old nuns that are still around, now dispossessed from the facilities they funded and built, have a problem with birth control or same sex partners.

    Maybe there are Catholic charities that aren't thinly veiled fronts for thievery and the exploitation of the poor but I don't know of any. Ask the poor, indigenous people of Latin America. Ask the Eskimos of Canada and Alaska, where in some communities, every single child over a multi generational period was sodomized or raped by a priest.

    I'm rooting for you. Set up some charities that do some good. I'm betting you never will. That's not the way the Catholic Church is run. The demonization and outcasting of American nuns after Vatican II proves that.

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  2. Reddog: If the hospital you referenced does not accept to offer to services to indigent or non-insured people, then they hardly deserve to be called Catholic.

    In Ontario, the various communities of Sisters have created a shell corporation as well, but they (or their appointed designate) are the only ones to sit on the corporation board so as to ensure that what you described does not occur here. Of course, we already have cradle to grave health care (and not the parody that the American media portrays) so this is not really much of an issue here.

    In any event, they most certainly charities who do not fit your categorization as "thinly veiled (I like the pun since we're talking about religious Sisters) fronts for thievery etc."

    Fr. Tim

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A Roman Catholic Evangelical Priest of the Diocese of Pembroke, Canada. Shown in my profile photo with my canine companion, Mateo.

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