Another Chance to Exercise Courage

At Townhall.com today, Salena Zito has an article entitled Religious Liberty Once Again Under Attack by Cultural Elites. She is specifically writing about the 600 Catholic Hospitals, which mostly serve underserved and minority communities and treat 1 out of 7 patients. But, while they provide healing to both body and soul, they don't perform abortions of surgeries to make people appear a different sex from that of their birth.

Zito starts out by describing the Sisters of Mercy hospital, established in Pittsburg in 1847.  At the time, Pittsburg was a frotier town, and a hospital was  a major boon to a place like that.

But back to the Sisters: Their Pittsburgh hospital, which now sits on a bluff on the edge of the central business district, has served the city through the Civil War, two world wars and several deadly pandemics. It remains Pittsburgh's only Catholic hospital with specialized services, including neurosurgery, a Level I trauma unit and state-of-the-art burn services.

For most of its existence, the neighborhood it occupies, the Bluff, has been a mix of immigrants, minorities and students attending the adjacent Duquesne University, also a Catholic institution.

It is one of those very unique places in the world of medicine where patients receive spiritual healing and benefit from the best cutting-edge technology in the health care world. All the while, it maintains its mission of welcoming everyone since the day it opened, regardless of race, nationality, age, gender or religion.

Now, the Biden administration, together with Planned Parenthood and other cultural elites want to force the hospital to violate the religious beliefs of those who run it, namely Catholics. Why? Religious freedom, after all is the first of the items listed in the First Amendment. But imagine if the administraion can get Catholics to literally de-moralize themselves by submitting to these proposed regulations.  Do you think the Evil One may  be at work here too?

It began this summer when Biden's appointees at the Department of Health and Human Services planned to revise Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act to add pregnancy termination, sexual orientation and gender identity to already existing "protections against discrimination on the basis of sex."

In short, the proposal would reverse the Trump administration protections that sought to allow health care professionals to opt out of performing procedures, such as abortions or gender reassignment surgeries, that violate their beliefs.

The usual groups against traditional faith piled on. Planned Parenthood, the nation's leading provider of abortions, now offers hormone therapy for transgender and gender-nonconforming patients, so it issued a statement immediately praising the Biden administration rule that would punish such Catholic hospitals.

The United States Catholic Conference of Bishops, in turn, condemned the proposed rule, saying it threatens the Catholic Church's ability to carry out healing ministries by mandating that health care workers perform life-altering surgeries to remove perfectly healthy body parts. The bishops also expressed their doubts that the HHS rule provided adequate religious-liberty protections: "Assurances that HHS will honor religious freedom laws offer little comfort when HHS is actively fighting court rulings that declared HHS violated religious freedom laws the last time they tried to impose such a mandate."

The bishops' conference called on HHS to disavow any such intent.

Fat chance that will happen, but one can hope. This is another case where the entire Church needs to stand courageously and say we will not violate our faith.