Welfare & Subsidiarity

HEALTH CARE/ What Defines a Catholic Hospital?

Lorenzo Albacete

mercoledì 17 febbraio 2010

I have spent the last week in a hospital accompanying a close relative, so I haven’t had the opportunity to follow the news in order to prepare this column. On the other hand, health care is one of the most debated issues in the United States today, a debate that is revealing a lot about the expectations of the American people at this point in the history of the American dream. This week, however, I wish to share some of my impressions about the place of the Catholic Church in the current health care debate.

Two articles concerning health care caught my attention during this last week spent at a Catholic hospital in the New York City area. The first article concerns the future of one of the most well known Catholic hospital in the City, namely, St. Vincent’s Hospital. St Vincent’s is headquartered in the historic lower East Side area of the City. Indeed, its location close to Ground Zero, its reputation as a first class health care facilities, as well as its “Catholic” concern for the poor and powerless, its spiritual support and religious sensitivity was specially noted after the 9/11/2001 terrorist attack. Now St Vincent’s has had to implement great reduction in its budget (around 300 employees were fired last week) in order to survive a little more time. Observers are not too confident that St. Vincent’s will survive as a Catholic hospital. It will go the way other Catholic hospitals in this area have gone: they have been bought by powerful, profit-making institutions offering the best in technology and technique.

I visited my doctor at one such hospital in the Bronx. It used to be called “Our Lady of Victory” Hospital. It was a small, community-oriented hospital, open to the amazing diversity of people in its neighborhood. I remember the statue of Our Lady outside the main entrance as if welcoming the varied sons and daughters into their common home to share, even in the midst of their sickness and pain, the victory of Her Son. The statue is, of course, gone, and the chapel with the Blessed Sacrament is now a meditation room. I asked my doctor’s secretary, a “New York Puerto Rican” whether she has worked there before “Our Lady of Victory” Hospital became part of the Montefiori health care empire, and she said she had. Then I asked whether she noticed any difference now from the way it was then, and she said: “Things are more efficient now, but something is missing, a warmth, a human warmth associated with Our Lady” (I don’t think she had read Dante’s reference to the “caldo…” in his Hymn to the Virgin!).

“A more human warmth”: this Bronx Puerto Rican secretary had experienced what defines a Catholic hospital. Of course, the Catholic hospital will make every effort to avail itself of the best possible professional health care staff and the latest in life-saving technologies. It will indeed aim at excellence and not be content with being a “friendly place” in which to be when you are sick. The warmth the secretary detected, the warmth that defines the Catholic hospital is not some shapeless “good-feeling atmosphere.” Rather, it is the warmth of a concrete Presence with a face and a name: Jesus Christ. For Catholics, humanity is defined by the recognition that each human person is a particular, unique and unrepeatable relation with Him. If the Church is unable to offer the witness of the Presence that guides its health care hospital service, than it should try another form of health care program.

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The second news article that struck me last week was the introduction, in a number of health care facilities, of “robot surgery,” in which machines operate on the patients guided by a doctor-technician, unseen, inside the console in another room. Somehow the news struck me as horrible when related to that human warmth that defines true Catholic hospitals. This procedure seems to me the final destruction of any such warmth.

The hospital were I have spent this last week is also struggling to keep its Catholic identity. The problem is mostly discussed in financial terms. I wonder how many people are seeing this at the level of what a true Catholic hospital should be, namely, the place of the Presence upon which all our contributions to human life is based. Worrisome signs that this is the case can be seen in a number of instances. First of all this hospital is the place of the miracle, accepted by the Holy See, that led to the canonization of the first American born saint: St. Elizabeth Seton. On the hallway that leads from the lobby to the elevators there is a big portrait of Mother Seton, at the entrance of the chapel where the Blessed Sacrament is kept. Still I have not been able to find a single person in the hospital who knows this particular and important event in the history of the U.S. The Eucharist is not celebrated in the chapel of the hospital. Instead is celebrated in a nursing home connected to the hospital and at a regular parish down the street, in the same block of the hospital complex.

When I asked one of the sisters who used to run the hospital why no Mass was celebrated at the hospital, she answered: “Because not too many people would be able to attend the Mass, and those who wanted to go could go to the nursing home or to the parish.” I tried to explain to her that the celebration of the Eucharist has nothing to do with number of people that attend. If only one person, one patient could go it’s worthwhile; in fact, if no one goes, Mass is still a miracle at the source of all miracles, including the one that led to Mother Seton’s canonization. Our relation with the Eucharist is the first stage of what makes us human and therefore of the warmth that defines a true Catholic hospital.

The loss of the sensitivity to the heart of the Catholic life explains why there is not a single cross on the floor where my relative is hospitalized. To my knowledge, no one has asked for the removing of the cross, as they did. The human warmth generated by the Catholic faith is still felt in this hospital because of the very large Hispanic community from which most of the patients and staff of the hospital come. But, how long can this last? If this hospital is to be saved as a true Catholic hospital many Elizabeth Seton will have to have to work another great miracle.