San Francisco-based Dignity Health (a secular institution with Catholic roots) and Catholic Health Initiatives, headquartered in Englewood, Colo., combined Feb. 1 into the nation’s second largest private health care provider, CommonSpirit.
Lidia Wasowicz interviewed Archbishop Cordileone on the merger.
Q. How and where does CommonSpirit fit into the legacy of Catholic health care?
A. Catholic health care systems are struggling to find ways to remain operating in accordance with our values and our vision within a changed world (and) economy.
Archbishop Cordileone
Dignity, (resulting from the 2012 reorganization of Catholic Healthcare West into a technically secular network of Catholic and non-Catholic hospitals) and (the consistently Catholic) Catholic Health Initiatives … saw the need to merge not just to be viable but to flourish.
In the new system, all its Catholic hospitals form one corporation and Dignity’s non-Catholic hospitals another. Both groups agree to abide by ethical religious directives, which forbid such procedures as abortion, physician-assisted suicide and in-vitro fertilization. In one exception, non-Catholic hospitals may perform direct sterilization, provided any related revenue be donated to charity rather than be mixed with the funds that the two put together to put up for bonds. So there’s no financial benefit from the revenue from these direct sterilizations.
(The merger) can increase the sort of impact the Catholic division of health care can have in the overall health care debate.
The above comes from an Oct. 7 interview of the archbishop with Catholic San Francisco, the archdiocese paper.
‘Cordileone approves . . . ‘ Does this mean the merger would not happen without the Archbishop’s approval?
That’s exactly right…..
So sorry about avoiding involvement in direct sterilizations through what appears to be just a technicality. This seems to be a real flaw. No mention of whether organ donation will be taking place in these facilities. Organ donation is a very big, mostly unaddressed, ethical problem. Death leaves most organs unsuitable for transplant, so “brain death” is declared (as I understand the situation) while vital functions such as heartbeat, respiration, digestion, and maybe others are still occurring, so that removable of donated organs will either cause or contribute to the donor’s death. As an organ donor is taken to the OR for the donation process, the person is not dead in the sense that he/she would be cremated or buried “as is.” This is most troubling. I have not looked into the matter sufficiently, but it seems that there can be no way to justify current practices of organ donation from the point of view of Catholic ethics.
Catholic ethics do not prohibit organ donation.
TL, DR; We don’t have Catholic hospitals anymore.