Healthcare's Ills: a Catholic diagnosis (original) (raw)

Managed Care, Catholic Vision, and the Claims of Justice

Christian Bioethics, 2000

There are numerous challenges posed to Roman Catholic health care institutions by recent developments in health care delivery. Some are practical, involving the acceptable limits of accommodation to and collaboration with secular networks of health care delivery. Others, quite often implicated in the first set, are explicitly theological. What does it mean to be a distinctively Roman Catholic health care institution? What are the nature and the scope of Roman Catholic institutional identity? More broadly, what is the moral relevance of themes in Roman Catholic social teaching to the provision of health care? This issue of Christian Bioethics addresses these questions with a spirited exchange among its authors. They offer noticeably different perspectives on the general cogency of Roman Catholic social teaching and different strategic recommendations for Roman Catholic institutions to maintain, or recover, their distinctive presence in health care delivery.

The Affordable Care Act and Community Benefit: A Mandate Catholic Health Care Can (Partly) Embrace

Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal, 2013

not-for-profit hospitals, including Catholic hospitals, to engage in meaningful community assessment and collaboration efforts in order to maintain their taxexempt status. Now that the ACA has been upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court, this paper argues that the requirements related to a more robust community engagement process should be embraced by Catholic not-for-profit hospitals and health systems. Apart from the legal requirements under ACA, an equally persuasive moral mandate to engage in community-level assessment and action exists in the ethical tradition of Catholic health care, particularly in the notions of the common good, preferential option for the poor, and subsidiarity. This paper examines the compelling nature of these moral norms in light of the dual goals of improving overall community health and reducing health disparities among vulnerable populations. It concludes with the examination of one model of community collaboration: Mobilizing for Action through Planning and Partnerships (MAPP).

Institutional Conscience and Catholic Health Care

2007

Despite serious challenges to the identity of Catholic health institutions in the United States, both Church and society should continue to see them as privileged places of moral discernment. This discernment occurs in “institutional conscience,” namely, a dialogue among all those authorized to act on the institution’s behalf about institutional actions, for example, medical interventions. The institutional conscience of Catholic health institutions should be respected by society at large, leaving them free to practice Christian healing and to show the problems with certain practices that they eject, such as abortion, and to seek alternatives. I WOULD LIKE TO CONSIDER the hopeful, as well as difficult situation of Catholic health institutions today. Although some health care practices present serious challenges to the Catholic identity of these institutions, we should see them as privileged places for moral discernment. The modern health care institution combines a wide range of gif...

Health Care, Jesus and the Church

Ecclesiology, 2004

This article seeks to identify distinctively Christian values that the Church might bring to public discussions of health care today. It does this by looking carefully at the Synoptic healing stories, identifying in the process four dominant virtues: compassion, care, faith and humility. It argues that together these virtues form an ideal typology that can be used to complement, deepen and sometimes challenge, but not simply replace, the prevalent values current within much health-care ethics today.

Catholic Identity in Healthcare: The Consistent Life Advocacy

This paper examines the history, unique identifiers, and other social issues within Catholic healthcare as described in Scripture, papal encyclicals, bishops’ writings, theological studies, and other research efforts. It provides insight into elements of Catholic identity, which lie at the heart of the Catholic healthcare industry.

Todd A. Salzman and Michael G. Lawler, Pope Francis and the Transformation of Health Care Ethics

Journal of Jesuit Studies

Like several other theological works in the era of Pope Francis, this wellresearched scholarly volume contains a proposal for reforms in church-based institutions so that their operations reflect the renewed priorities of the first Jesuit pope. In this case, the authors maintain a sharp focus on one nation (the United States), one sector (healthcare), and even on one series of documents. At issue are the Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services (hereafter erd), a document first promulgated in 1948 to provide guidelines for the institutional life of church-sponsored hospitals, clinics, and healthcare facilities in the US. The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (usccb) published the sixth edition of this important document in 2018. Although Salzman and Lawler provide insightful treatment of the evolution of successive versions of the erd, most of this volume analyzes the shortcomings of the 2018 edition. The authors' primary criticism is that the latest revision of the usccb document fails to incorporate the theological advances and pastoral priorities of the Francis papacy. The resulting inadequacies hold serious consequences for the important decision-making processes that unfold in healthcare settings. At stake are weighty prudential matters such as determining which treatments in end-of-life scenarios are licit and the terms by which Catholic hospitals collaborate with non-Catholic health care institutions. This diagnosis of the shortcomings of the erd document unfolds in the early chapters of the book, which take up such fundamental topics as moral anthropology, sources of ethical knowledge, and issues in ecclesiology as well as pastoral and spiritual care of patients in Catholic healthcare facilities. To extend the medical metaphor, the prescription for improvement appears primarily in an insightful final chapter titled "Suggestions for a Revised erd." Congruent with standard accounts of the evolution of the post-Vatican ii theological enterprise, the authors draw a contrast between inherited approaches to healthcare ethics (based upon natural law methodology and a set of rather static assumptions regarding morality and social order) and more adequate approaches that incorporate updated perspectives on cultural diversity, gender justice, option for the poor, the role of conscience, careful discernment, and respect for the dignity of all grounded in Vatican ii's call to scrutinize the evolving signs of the times. One handy way to capture this shift as it applies to healthcare ethics is to speak of a transition from a merely physicalist approach

Pope Francis and Catholic Healthcare Ethics

Theological Studies, 2019

This article examines the influence of Pope Francis on Catholic healthcare ethics. The first section offers an analytical summary of his ethics. The second section reviews a “Franciscan” approach to Catholic healthcare ethics, which situates that field within the broader context of Catholic social teaching. The third section analyzes the implications of three of Francis’s most powerful metaphors: his injunction to “go to the peripheries”; his contrast between a throwaway culture and a culture of encounter; and his comparison of the church to a field hospital.