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. These hospitals are part of the backbone of American health care, amounting to 15 percent of hospital beds.
Already in Bend, Ore., last year, a bishop ended the church�s official relationship with St. Charles Medical Center for making tubal ligation sterilizations available to women who requested them. And two Catholic hospitals in Texas halted tubal ligations at the insistence of the local bishop in Tyler.
The National Women�s Law Center has just issued a report quoting doctors at Catholic-affiliated hospitals as saying 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. More clashes are likely as the church hierarchy grows more conservative, and as hospitals and laity grow more impatient with bishops who seem increasingly out of touch.
Catholic hospitals like St. Joseph�s that are evicted by the church continue to operate largely as before. The main consequence is that Mass can no longer be said in the hospital chapel. Thomas C. Fox, the editor of National Catholic Reporter, noted regretfully that a hospital with deep Catholic roots like St. Joseph�s now cannot celebrate Mass, while airport chapels can. Mr. Fox added: �Olmsted�s moral certitude is lifeless, leaving no place for compassionate Christianity.�
To me, this battle illuminates two rival religious approaches, within the Catholic church and any spiritual tradition. One approach focuses upon dogma, sanctity, rules and the punishment of sinners. The other exalts compassion for the needy and mercy for sinners � and, perhaps, above all, inclusiveness.
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.�
With the Vatican seemingly as deaf and remote as it was in 1517, some Catholics at the grass roots are pushing to recover their faith. Jamie L. Manson, the same columnist for National Catholic Reporter who proclaimed that Jesus had been �evicted,� also argued powerfully that many ordinary Catholics have reached a breaking point and that St. Joseph�s heralds a new vision of Catholicism: �Though they will be denied the opportunity to celebrate the Eucharist, the Eucharist will rise out of St. Joseph�s every time the sick are healed, the frightened are comforted, the lonely are visited, the weak are fed, and vigil is kept over the dying.�
If I saw a drunk man getting into a car, and i walked up and shot him in the head, it would be murder, even though there was a good chance that he would have killed one or more people had he been allowed to drive. The truth is, we don't know the outcome because that option was taken away with the life of the child.
I find it odd that the very best argument for taking a life is saving a different one. Isn't it God's job to decide which one lives?
It seems to me that this was a chance to make a political point and the hospital took it. How easy would it have been to transfer her to another hospital that does that? The problem with that is, it wouldn't have made the papers, so they did it there for the media attention.
I notice it was the far left New York Times that ran the story. From the slant given to the article, it is obvious this is a political hack job. Approval of abortion has dropped below 50% for the first time, so the far left have to do something to justify their position.
Abortion is never justified, not even to save the life of the mother. What kind of mother chooses to sacrifice her child for the sake of her own welfare anyway? It's supposed to be the other way around. And who really thinks earth is so amazing that they'd kill someone else to stay here? Personally, I'm ready to go whenever God wants to take me. I trust His wisdom and goodness and sovereignty in that. It's very foolish for man to try to play God; we're lacking in the fullness of that wisdom and goodness and sovereignty.
"This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers" (1 John 3:16 NIV).
A friend of mine was told to terminate her pregnancy because her child would be born with down syndrome, missing a leg or foot (forgot which), and an oversized heart, and would likely not live. She said no despite all the pressures the doctors put on her. Then they tried to force her to terminate her parental rights, but she still refused. The funny thing this happened before all the preliminary test were back. They found out the baby would not be born with down syndrome, and then they discovered he was not missing a foot at all. Eventually the enlarged heart came to back to normal size.
So why am I saying all this. Like Leon says, we don't know the future. It's so easy to say hey your pregnancy is going to kill you, you need to terminate your pregnancy. It's one thing if it were an ectopic pregnancy where there is no way the baby will survive or if the baby is already dead, but another thing for a normal pregnancy. (One day maybe they science will find away to save ectopic babies. Artificial wombs maybe?) If her life was that threatened, then instead of saying you have to terminate the pregnancy completely, doctors should have offered another alternative, such as allowing the growing baby to survive in an incubator if the baby is far enough along.
