Until recently Caritas Christi was unambiguously owned and operated by the Archdiocese of Boston, with the archbishop serving as chairman and the chancellor and vicar general also sitting on the board. But in the early years of the 21st century the agency's troubles drew unwanted attention from a paternalistic state government.
In April 2004, Archbishop Sean O'Malley dismissed the president of Caritas Christi, Dr. Michael Collins. Although no explicit reason was given for the ouster, it was generally understood that the new archbishop was dissatisfied with the doctor's management style. But the first replacement for Dr. Collins, Emmett Murphy, brought no relief; he stepped down hastily after reporters questioned the accuracy of his resume. Next came Dr. Robert Haddad, who was forced out in 2006 amid accusations of sexual harassment of female employees.
Meanwhile, the financial losses were mounting and Caritas Christi was actively seeking a buyer. By 2007, the agency was involved in serious talks with Ascension Health, the nation's largest Catholic health care system. But those talks trailed off, in part because accountants discovered that Caritas Christi had overstated its revenues by $10 million.
At this point the attorney general of Massachusetts, Martha Coakley, announced that she could no longer watch the archdiocesan health care system flounder. Citing her duty to supervise the affairs of non-profit groups, she announced an investigation of Caritas Christi. In March 2008 the attorney general released a highly critical report, and recommended major changes in the agency's governance. She strongly recommended that the Boston archdiocese "relinquish direct and indirect control over strategic, operational, and financial matters, and focus only on moral and ethical issues."
The archdiocese quietly acceded to the proposed reforms. In a sweeping reorganization announced a few weeks later, the archbishop of Boston lost his traditional place as chairman, and the archdiocese was allotted only three seats on the 16-member board. The archdiocese announced that its control over the affairs of Caritas Christi would henceforth be "limited to matters pertaining to Catholic identity, mission, and the implementation of the religious and ethical directives of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, and any transaction that would involve the sale or transfer of the system."
In a highly unusual policy for a non-profit organization, the reconstituted Caritas Christi has declined to identify the members of its board of directors. The latest official papers filed with state regulators do not reflect the organizational changes of May 2008. So when Caritas Christi became involved in the controversial bid for the state health care contract, Catholics hoping to influence the agency's policies--or to express their concerns about the moral dimensions of the government contract bid--did not know where to address their concerns.
Just three members of the 16-member board of Caritas Christi have been publicly identified, and none of them has a background that would reassure pro-life activists. Dr. Ralph de la Torre, who as president is an ex officio board member, has been a forceful advocate for an independent hospital system, and the primary force behind the contract bid. James Karam, the chairman of the board, is a businessman whose political sympathies are evident in his generous contributions to liberal Democratic candidates such as Barack Obama. And the only identified cleric on the board, Father J. Bryan Hehir, has been the bête noire of conservative Catholics nationwide since the 1980s, when he emerged as a major architect of the US bishops' pastoral letter on nuclear weaponry and an apologist for the "seamless garment" approach that saw abortion as only one among many critical issues in political campaigns. Father Hehir, Caritas Christi told inquiring Catholics, served on the board as Cardinal O'Malley's representative, to ensure that the health care system protected its Catholic identity. If that message was intended to ease the concerns of pro-life activists, it failed badly.
NO REASSURANCES
In answer to questions from inquiring Catholics, Caritas Christi officials said that the Catholic hospitals would not perform abortions, even if the Commonwealth Family Health Plan (CFHP) won the government contract. Nevertheless, in response to similar questions from the secular press, the joint venture issued a terse statement that the CFHP "will contract with providers, both in and out of the Caritas network, to ensure access to all services required by the authority, including confidential family planning services." How could these two claims be reconciled? No explanation was forthcoming.
Caritas Christi, Centene Corporation, and the Archdiocese of Boston have all refused to disclose exactly how CFHP would respond to patients' requests for abortions. Caritas Christi has assured the public that Catholic hospitals would not perform abortions. Nevertheless the abortions would be performed under the terms of the contract the Catholic agency sought to win.
snip
(closing paragraph)
The government contract will undoubtedly bring a critical infusion of revenue for the Caritas Christi system. The alliance with Centene Corporation in the CFHP may even lead to a successful sale of the troubled Caritas Christi system. But the apparent involvement of Catholic hospitals in a system that provides subsidized abortions--and the steadfast refusal of the Boston archdiocese to explain how that involvement could possibly be justified--is an astonishing setback for the culture of life. And it bears emphasis that this situation did not arise because the state government forced Caritas Christi into a morally untenable position; the Catholic agency deliberately sought to be involved. The Catholic Action League called the development "a significant defeat for the pro-life movement, inflicted not by secular society, but by the Catholic Church in Boston."
There have been updates to this story over the past couple of days - here in the Globe, for example and I'll have more to add to this post in a bit (I have to run out for a while), but just know that if you want a good book-length introduction to how Catholic health systems have gotten into this mess, a new release from OSV by Leonard J. Nelson from right here in Birmingham (he is a professor at the Cumberland School of Law of Samford University and an
affiliated scholar with the Lister Hill Center for Health Policy at the
University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Public Health) will do the trick: Diagnosis Critical: The Urgent Threats Confronting Catholic Health Care is a sober, instructive look at the situation.
I'll have more later, including Dr. Nelson's thoughts on the Caritas situation.
Friday is also the day Cardinal Sean updates his blog, so I'd be interested to see if he addresses it there.
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Todd,
Phew!
Then I can assume we agree that when you do your research about the Caritas situation, review the links provided in google, read the stories, click into the links to see the abortionists Caritas has contracted with, read the misleading statements of the diocese and the Cardinal himself - you do not object to persons holding the people in charge of this thing accountable for it's content and the conduct surrounding the scandal?
For it is not in dispute that Hehir was the Cardinal's architect and whatever you want to believe about his formation and fidelity, or choose not to believe -- putting a spin on this that there is some kind of political partisan motive behind holding him accountable is objectionable to the people who have been working on this thing for four months.
Todd,
Every Catholic, you see, has a right to ensure that those teaching opinions of the Church or being the Cardinal's representative on a contract that includes abortions actually is faithful to the teachings of the Church. The reasons we have those rights is because we want our children and in fact every Catholic in the pew formed properly. We want contracts that won't put others in the position of violating their religion or exploiting people who are trusting they will "do no harm".
The people working on this are very, very upset about what this contract really means to the people who will die in the performance of it, the people who will be scandalized, victimized, spiritually abused, the Catholics who will no longer be able to work in healthcare because of the promises Caritas made(with the approval of the Cardinal) that they will say things against their conscience and they will be monitored by Planned Parenthood who said Catholics will be made to say them. They want to hold the people accountable for, not just the contract - but the scandalous and untruthful conduct surrounding it.
Look forward to the update..
Any hospital or agency associated with the Catholic Church in any way should not be associated in any way with an agency which does or promotes abortion.
The Catholic hospital I worked in, a part of Ascension Health, censured a doctor for telling a patient he would transfer her to the non Catholic hospital in town so she could have an abortion..and charting that he did so. That hospital did not give post partum instruction in contraception. It did not perform tubal ligations or vasectomies. It definitely lost business by not performing tubal ligations, as women having planned C sections who wanted their tubes tied at the same time, would choose to go to the other hospital. The health care plan did not pay for contraceptives, much less, God forbid, for abortion ,and the hospital pharmacy did not carry them.
If patients taking birth control pills came into the hospital, they were of course allowed to bring them in as private possessions, and take them on their own, but nurses did not dispense them. Any other medication, the patients were told to leave their own at home and it would be dispensed from our pharmacy. This is the way a Catholic hospital ought to behave. My information is ten years old so I don't know if this has changed now. I read the ethics section of the Ascension Health site and saw nothing mentioned about contraception at all, and some equivocation about tubal pregnancies; it seemed to be equating the illicit methotrexate procedure with the licit procedure of removing the tube.
There is no excuse whatsoever for this business in Boston. If we can't trust the Catholic Church to stand firm on life and sexual morality issues, to whom shall we go? And we can't expect anyone to take our difficult and countercultural teachings seriously if we abandon them the minute money is involved. Nor is "care for the poor" any excuse; you cannot act in charity by violating charity, and there is no worse violation of charity than assisting people to sin. This is helping them not only to sin mortally, but to kill their own children.
Of course it's about formation.
The Catholic Action Leauge today put out a press released that indicates five out of nine on the Board of Directors at Caritas has been giving money to politicians who advocate abortion policies once they get elected.
Almost every hire or appointment in employment history is done based upon the ideas of the person you need to fill the role. I've hired hundreds of people in my lifetime. Every interview I ever conducted in business (non-religious), I asked questions about their ideas. The whole purpose of an interview process is to rule out people who are not suitable for a job because their ideas don't match the achievements you're trying to accomplish.
When bishops hire and appoint people without finding out what kind of ideas they have about doctrine, this is the kind of malfeasance that led to hiring pedophiles and in this instance a proabortion priest has placed children into the dangers of being murdered.
We've got to hold Bishops accountable.
Just because the investigation made some recommendations, do they have the ability to enforce it?
God have Mercy on us.
JMJ
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