The grave scandal to the Christian faithful
Bishop Thomas Olmsted is helpfully forthright. He’s up front about the fact that the Catholic church is adamant that women must die rather than terminate their pregnancies. He’s also up front about his absolute rule over Catholic hospitals.
St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center in Phoenix, Ariz., will be stripped of its Catholic status on Friday unless Catholic Healthcare West meets several demands outlined in a Nov. 22 letter from Bishop Thomas Olmsted…The issue stems from the 2009 decision by the hospital to authorize an abortion to save the life of a pregnant woman.
Catholics are not allowed to save a woman’s life at the expense of an 11-week-old fetus. They have to say No, and let her die. That is the Catholic way.
Olmsted wrote that St. Joseph’s hospital would need to meet several demands before the hospital could regain his support, including submitting to a diocesan review and certification “to ensure full compliance” with the Catholic Church’s moral teachings…CHW also must agree to provide its medical staff with ongoing training on the church’s ethical and religious directives regarding indirect abortions…
Olmsted wrote that CHW’s “actions communicate to me that [the hospital does] not respect my authority to authentically teach and interpret moral law in this diocese.”
How dare they. How dare they not respect a bishop’s authority to tell them to let a woman die instead of saving her life. How dare they not let a bishop run their hospital.
He added, “Because of this, I must act now” to ensure that “no further such violations” take place at the hospital and to “repair the grave scandal to the Christian faithful that has resulted from the procedure.”
The grave scandal to the Christian faithful is that a woman was not prevented from having a life-saving procedure. The grave scandal to the Christian faithful is that her four children still have a mother, which they wouldn’t have if the bishop had had his way. Grave scandal indeed.
Don’t forget: all faiths insist that compassion is the test of true spirituality.
If a doctor made the recommendation that this Bishop did, he would have violated his code of ethical conduct, lose his license, and likely lose a civil suit. As far as I can see, the Bishop doing all he can possibly do to be prosecuted for attempted murder. How is pressuring professional health care providers to deliberately withhold lifesaving treatment from a patient in crisis, in violation of standard procedures and ethical guidelines, not equivalent to attempted murder?
They had to convene an ethics committee( http://www.usatoday.com/news/religion/2010-12-16-Catholic_hospital15_ST_N.htm?csp=34) before they went ahead and saved her life.A nun from that committee was sent to another parish because she agreed to the decision.Olmsted is an asshole, but the administration of that Hospital is somewhat dodgy as well.
Every time I hear someone tell me that “God is love” and “Religion is about compassion” I will just point them here. Sickening….
This is the inevitable consequence of elevating dogma over compassion, humanity, empathy, and all those other qualities atheists are famous for lacking. The good bishop has no doubt examined his conscience, and found it completely in accord with Vatican norms.
Rorschach, yes, I assume the administration is dodgy, since it is after all a Catholic hospital. But the bishop’s demands and rebukes and shouts put things so clearly…
[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Bertrand Le Roy and UK Brights. UK Brights said: RT @OpheliaBenson: The grave scandal to the Christian faithful http://dlvr.it/Bww73 […]
…and in the very next post you mention oxymorons, because there are only so many one can look past before beginning to sputter…
I had to change my health insurance provider for the upcoming year because my current insurance provider cut the list of supported healthcare providers so much that the only remaining clinic near where I live is Woodland Healthcare. That didn’t bother me until I found out that Woodland Healthcare is actually part of the Catholic Healthcare West system and I read their ethics and values web pages. I don’t think so.
No, no, no, no, no, no – you’re getting it all wrong. The Church isn’t killing women – God is killing women. Because, you know, he’s loving and just.
I haven’t read the link. Don’t need the emetic right now. But I thought the church could get around these issues with the doctrine of double effect. Basically, the doctor could save the woman and kill the fetus, if his intention was to do good. Saving the woman would be good. The demise of the fetus while bad and foreseen was not intended and thus all’s good.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/double-effect/
From the link:
The New Catholic Encyclopedia provides four conditions for the application of the principle of double effect:
The act itself must be morally good or at least indifferent.
The agent may not positively will the bad effect but may permit it. If he could attain the good effect without the bad effect he should do so. The bad effect is sometimes said to be indirectly voluntary.
The good effect must flow from the action at least as immediately (in the order of causality, though not necessarily in the order of time) as the bad effect. In other words the good effect must be produced directly by the action, not by the bad effect. Otherwise the agent would be using a bad means to a good end, which is never allowed.
The good effect must be sufficiently desirable to compensate for the allowing of the bad effect“ (p. 1021).
1. seems to be satisfied in saving the woman.
2. is satisfied if the surgeon doesn’t positively will the fetus’ death.
3. might be iffy, but I’m sure it could be sidestepped easily enough.
4. This is where I see the Bishop rejecting double effect. The death of a woman is nothing compared to another catholic in the world, especially if it’s a boy!
In this case it may not matter how the church can get around what. The bishop seems to be claiming He is The Decider.
Indeed, he’s decided he knows what God wants and that’s that.
I keep chiming in on this point but it does set the stage for these decisions. The dominant “ethical” position in Catholicism is Thomas Aquinas’s Natural Law theology where the only deciding fact about the morality of an action is its relation to the ends. The “end” of a penis is making women pregnant; to prevent that end through any act such as say a condom or some private naughty time is evil. Ditto pregnancy. Note, it’s not the death of the foetus that is therefore the wrong caused by an abortion, it’s the prevention of a pregnancy coming to term.
That’s as far as I’ve got with Thomism though so I’m curious to see how much it takes the view that all evils are part of God’s plan or whether it is more focused than that and I’m certainly not clear on its relationship to human agency but I’m pretty certain that it doesn’t care about any of the suffering.
Ophelia, Ophelia. Clearly you haven’t gotten the true message of Christ. Life isn’t important to the good Bish; death all that counts to Christians.
Thanks Richard. That’s pretty much what former (Anglican) bishop Holloway said about an opponent’s view of his view on equality for gays: the point is not what’s good for people here and now, the point is what happens to them after death, so what looks more “compassionate” now is really not. Because of course being gay=eternal damnation.
Never mind all the philosophical casuistry. If no evidence for the constructs of religiosity are offered, ignore religion. The religious are welcome to their fantasies, always provided that they keep them to themselves or share them only with the like-minded, subject in all cases to the condition that these fantasies are not visited upon the vulnerable.
I will start listening with respect to the Catholic clergy on medical issues the day they come out and renounce their murderous, arrogant, erroneous and anticompassionate past, particularly relating to their mediaeval war on midwives and women who were health workers.
I do not expect the Infallible Church to move anywhere but in the opposite direction.
http://tmh.floonet.net/articles/witches.html
http://www.google.com.au/search?source=ig&hl=en&rlz=1G1TSAUCENAU400&=&q=midwives+and+mediaeval+catholicism&btnG=Google+Search&aq=f&oq=
[…] Remember Thomas Olmsted, bishop of Phoenix? Who stripped St Joseph’s Hospital of its Catholic status because it aborted a fetus that was doomed in any case, in order to save the mother (who has four small children)? Remember the ACLU letter to the Feds urging them to enforce the law – the law that says hospitals can’t deny patients life-saving procedures? I guess the ACLU looks pretty silly now – because that’s not the law after all! […]