They could have handled this worse. They could have waited until tomorrow, and turned the sick away on Christmas Eve.
The head of the Catholic church in Phoenix has stripped Arizona’s largest hospital of its Catholic affiliation after he ruled that a decision to save the life of a mother by terminating her 11-week pregnancy was morally wrong.
Bishop Thomas Olmsted announced yesterday that St Joseph’s hospital can no longer be considered to be Catholic. The ruling breaks a relationship that stretches back to the hospital’s founding by Catholic nuns 115 years ago.
He has also excommunicated the member of the hospital’s ethics committee that permitted the abortion to go ahead.
Bishops over doctors:
“The baby was healthy and there was no problems with the pregnancy; rather, the mother had a disease that needed to be treated. But instead of treating the disease, St Joseph’s decided that the healthy, 11-week-old baby should be directly killed. This is contrary to the teaching of the church,” Olmsted said.
Not just any hospital:
St Joseph’s has 697 beds and 5,000 staff, and this year admitted 40,000 in-patients. It is world-renowned for its work on Parkinson’s disease and neurosurgery, and is regularly voted among the top 10 hospitals in the US.
And, get this:
The split will not affect the hospital’s income as the church does not fund it. The only visible change that will be evident immediately is that the blessed sacrament will be removed from the hospital’s chapel and mass will no longer be held there.
So the church had a free ride on a prestigious association — not to mention the ability to minister, on site, 
to the sick — and terminated it because it knows better than the medical establishment what is good and healthy for a woman’s body. Not just stupid, despicable. Downright un-Christian!
The Catholic Health Association has defied the bishop. The NYTimes editorializes, “the need to accommodate religious doctrine does not give health providers serving the general public license to jeopardize women’s lives.”
In light of what it says is an increasing problem, the ACLU has asked federal health officials to ensure that Catholic hospitals provide emergency reproductive care to pregnant women.
Image credit, Jeff Fecke.