The Gender Institute at Saint Francis Memorial Hospital in San Francisco, which is part of the Dignity Health hospital system, performs gender transition surgeries. Saint Francis has a “LGBTQ Health Care Equality Leader” designation from the Human Rights Campaign Foundation and the Dignity Health website page for Saint Francis describes it as “a secular hospital in a Catholic organization.”
Citing the compassion of the Sisters of Mercy who founded the hospital system, Dignity Health’s website page Caring Care for LGBTQ+ People and their Families states that the hospital system is “proud” to offer “care” to “LGBTQ+ people.” This “care” includes gender transition surgeries and surgeries for “gender-non-conforming” individuals.
In addition to genital destruction and construction, the surgeries offered by the Gender Institute include facial contouring, adjustments to brow and hairline, and adjustments to the voice box.
In an interview, Dr. Heidi Wittenberg, medical director of the Gender Institute, lamented that in 2015 when she first started transgender surgeries, her patients were older and their friends and families did not agree with their gender transitions. “We weren’t seeing the younger generation that had supportive parents.” Wittenberg is “devoted to helping people have the anatomy with which they should have been born.”
Wittenberg began practicing as an OB-GYN and then specialized in urogynecology before coming to her present position with the Gender Institute. “I’m now 100% focused on transgender, gender diverse and gender-non-conforming surgery. I feel like I have come full circle and I’m delivering new babies into the world.”
Dignity Health operates 24 Catholic hospitals and 15 not-Catholic hospitals but its website says that “the mission and values we were founded upon remain the same.” The Statement of Common Values for the whole organization says that elective abortion, in vitro fertilization, and physician-assisted suicide are not part of Dignity Health’s mission.
Dignity Health is a platinum sponsor, the highest level, of the “Trans March” in San Francisco and is “delighted to be part of it.”
– Exclusive story by Mary Rose
Would we feel any better if it were “Catholic” Germans who operated the “showers” at Auschwitz?
Mutilating people is not Christian (or humane). For years, female genital mutilation has been condemned. Now, it’s celebrated.
Bishops, please direct Catholic organizations to remove the title “Catholic” from their names, when they simply are no longer Catholic.
(I realize they have no civil authority to do so. Yet, if there are any practicing Catholics still leading such organizations, they should get the message. And, it would send a clear statement to all people.)
Saint Francis, pray for us, especially this hospital bearing your name!
And, may God heal those suffering from gender dysphoria. May we continue to pray (and work) for them.
Time to sell it off or change their Statement of Common Values. Saint Francis Hospital clinging to any shred of Catholic identification causes scandal among the faithful and confusion among the rest
Some fellow Catholics no doubt approve of this.
Yes, ones sympathetic to homosexualist ideology, some of whom post on this site. They are misled and stubbornly attached to their twisted view of the world, and though they proclaim themselves Your Fellow Catholics, their hearts are far from truth.
Yikes… I just got done watching the William Hurt version of 1984.
“devoted to helping people have the anatomy with which they should have been born.”
I look at the pics of this grinning woman I wonder about demonic influence and possession. Corruption, sin, evil, satanic.
May God have mercy on her.
Just another “Catholic” something or someone that isn’t.
So this administrator at a “Catholic” organization says it is going to fix God’s mistakes?
I remember when the argument of the LGB (before they added the T and all the other letters) was “God doesn’t make mistakes”, trying to justify the “born this way” falsehood about being homosexual and saying we should give them marriage. See? They don’t tell the truth. They just say what they think will get them a win. Now that they have marriage, they change the argument to fixing people born in the wrong bodies. Wait? What? I thought you people said God didn’t make mistakes. Which is it now?
Can the Catholic name be pulled off of these organizations and would good Catholics quit supporting these places?
From the Code of Canon Law: Canon 216 “… no undertaking is to claim the name Catholic without the consent of competent ecclesiastical authority.” That almost always means the local diocesan bishop. And, the intent and meaning are pretty clear. Yet, like Canons 915 and 916, about abortion promoters, other notorious public sinners and others receiving Holy Communion; it relies on a bishop applying it. Some bishops prefer Eucharistic incoherence and a “come one, come all, get your Holy Communion here!” approach. Years ago, the bishop where the National Catholic Reporter (also known as the National Catholic Distorter) is located directed them to stop using Catholic in their name. Unfaithful dissenters that they are, they simply ignored his direction and have continued to do so. (Of course, under civil law, a bishop cannot prevent use of the term/title Catholic, only under Canon Law, which Catholics used to think applied to us.) Bishops could do the same with so-called Catholic schools and prohibit Sacraments from being administered on their campuses. I don’t know any that have, yet, that would make a clear statement. Maybe they could start with no marriages in chapels at Jesuit universities?
All i can say is this is really sick.
Walk a mile in my shoes and then judge me!
God dose NOT make Mistakes ever, if you were born with a penis you are a male and with a vagina you are a woman
HOMOSEXUAL IS EVIL ..!
there may be (rare) individual exceptions
but in terms of large health networks, there
are NO catholic hospitals, as in NONE.
irrespective of what their names/labels are.
they were “captured” a long time ago by the Enemy
What a joke. They don’t do sterilization with a bishop’s dispensation at the Mercy hospitals, but they mutilate the genitals and reproductive organs of a person if they claim to be born with the wrong sex?
This is so back asswards, it isn’t even funny.
Begone of Friends of Satan! Stick to the Cathoic Faith, Peiod! Ask Saint Francis of Assis for help! Pray the Rosary! Go to Confession!
was that Gender-Bender Institute?