The Update
Some months later, an update.
Nicholas Kristof spells it out:
The National Catholic Reporter newspaper put it best: "Just days before Christians celebrated Christmas, Jesus got evicted."
Yet the person giving Jesus the heave-ho in this case was not a Bethlehem innkeeper. Nor was it an overzealous mayor angering conservatives by pulling down Christmas decorations. Rather, it was a prominent bishop, Thomas Olmsted, stripping St. Joseph's Hospital and Medical Center in Phoenix of its affiliation with the Roman Catholic diocese.
The hospital's offense? It had terminated a pregnancy to save the life of the mother. The hospital says the 27-year-old woman, a mother of four children, would almost certainly have died otherwise.
Bishop Olmsted initially excommunicated a nun, Sister Margaret McBride, who had been on the hospital's ethics committee and had approved of the decision. That seems to have been a failed attempt to bully the hospital into submission, but it refused to cave and continues to employ Sister Margaret. Now the bishop, in effect, is excommunicating the entire hospital — all because it saved a woman's life.
Make no mistake: This clash of values is a bellwether of a profound disagreement that is playing out at many Catholic hospitals around the country ....
An ideological battle over health care is playing out in the Catholic hierarchy. St. Charles Medical Center, in Bend, Oregon, also lost its relationship with the Catholic church after bishops objected to the hospital's performance of tubal ligations upon request. And in Texas, Kristof writes, the bishop in Tyler has influenced two hospitals to stop performing tubal ligations.
Meanwhile, some doctors at Catholic affiliated hospitals complain, according to Kristof, "that sometimes they are forced by church doctrine to provide substandard care to women with miscarriages or ectopic pregnancies in ways that can leave the women infertile or even endanger their lives".
The thought that keeps nagging at me is this: If you look at Bishop Olmsted and Sister Margaret as the protagonists in this battle, one of them truly seems to me to have emulated the life of Jesus. And it's not the bishop, who has spent much of his adult life as a Vatican bureaucrat climbing the career ladder. It's Sister Margaret, who like so many nuns has toiled for decades on behalf of the neediest and sickest among us.
Then along comes Bishop Olmsted to excommunicate the Christ-like figure in our story. If Jesus were around today, he might sue the bishop for defamation.
Yet in this battle, it's fascinating how much support St. Joseph's Hospital has had and how firmly it has pushed back — in effect, pounding 95 theses on the bishop's door. The hospital backed up Sister Margaret, and it rejected the bishop's demand that it never again terminate a pregnancy to save the life of a mother.
"St. Joseph's will continue through our words and deeds to carry out the healing ministry of Jesus," said Linda Hunt, the hospital president. "Our operations, policies, and procedures will not change." The Catholic Health Association of the United States, a network of Catholic hospitals around the country, stood squarely behind St. Joseph's.
Anne Rice, the author and a commentator on Catholicism, sees a potential turning point. "St. Joseph's refusal to knuckle under to the bishop is huge," she told me, adding: "Maybe rank-and-file Catholics are finally talking back to a hierarchy that long ago deserted them."
And, hey, anytime you can go from Nicholas Kristof to Anne Rice, you can call it a good day.
Er ... um ... oh, right.
Yeah. That's the news, and I am ... uh ... anyway, yeah.
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Notes:
Kristof, Nicholas. "Tussling Over Jesus". The New York Times. January 27, 2011. NYTimes.com. January 28, 2011. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/27/opinion/27kristof.html