Tail’s wagging the dog here. The PR wing of Catholic Health Care Inc. should know its place.

Thanks Peterr.

So much for the church helping those without and in need.

I will be semi-gracious and NOT state what I really think of the Bishop and his fellow travelers.

How churches march straightforward into irrelevance.

Well said, Peterr.

Even those with little knowledge of the Bible recall that Jesus spent his short life serving and tending what was considered the outcasts of society without pre-condition or admonition. These strict doctrine authoritations in the Catholic Church and the fundamentalist Christian Churches have completely abandoned Christianity and the moral tenents of most faiths. They represent the worst of society. They seem to derive pleasure from callousness.

The RCs have always favoured dogma over Christianity.

It starts with “Papal Infallability” and goes downhill from than point. The whole curch presumes to speak for God.

As my father used to say, and I’m sure his father too “To Hell With The Pope”. They were strong anti-catholics, (My Grandfather was a leader in the Oddfellows) for reasons I never understood.

I wouldn’t say “always,” but certainly too often for my theological tastes.

For example, up in the logging country of Minnesota, a group of Benedictine sisters created what evolved into Minnesota’s workers comp program:

Hospital services have been a part of Bemidji since the lumberjack days of the 1890′s. In those early days when Bemidji consisted of one store, a small post office and six homes, the Benedictine sisters of the motherhouse in Duluth leased the second floor of the Nangle Store at Third Street and Minnesota Avenue and equipped it for temporary use as a hospital which they named St. Anthony’s.

The hospital, which could accommodate 24 patients, was often referred to as the “Lumberjack Hospital” since the sisters helped finance their project and provided much needed service by going into the woods to sell hospital insurance tickets to local lumberjacks. The tickets, which at first cost $1 and later increased to as much as $7.50, entitled the purchaser to ward accommodations and medical, surgical and nursing care for one year. This arrangement eventually led to an assessment being held out of the holder’s paycheck, and finally ended when Minnesota passed its Workmens’ Compensation Laws in 1913.

There is a rich Roman Catholic tradition of service to those in need that today’s bishops are all to eager to forget.

The roots of the St. Charles Medical Center are remarkably similar to the hospital in Bemidji:

On a ship bound for Ireland in 1908, a Catholic priest from Bend struck a friendship with a nun from Tipton, Indiana. Father Luke Sheehan would convince Mother Gertrude Moffitt of the need for a hospital in the small timber town.

Ten years after that fateful meeting, the Sisters of St. Joseph arrived in Bend to start a small hospital. The Sisters opened their first hospital on the bank of the Deschutes River in 1918.

The Sisters built a larger hospital on “Hospital Hill” in downtown Bend in 1922. They blessed and named the new hospital in honor of Bishop Charles O’Reilly, the first bishop of the Catholic Diocese of Baker.

Oddly ironic that a hospital named for the founding bishop of the diocese has now been repudiated by his successor (several times removed).

According to the Catholic News Service, the problem was this: “The main point of contention is tubal ligation, a form of permanent female reproductive sterilization.” God forbid, says Bishop Vasa, that a woman be allowed, in consultation with her doctor, to have such a horrific operation. If getting pregnant is so dangerous to the life of the woman, better that she not have sex than have this operation

Has the Pope said this? Is this really Church teaching?

On the other side of the US, the Archdiocese of DC has been squabbling with the DC city council over providing benefits to same-sex spouses/partners. Catholic Charities in DC decided to get out of the foster care business rather than treat its employees with equity. To their credit, Catholic Charities turned over the entire program — staff and all — to another provider, rather than simply going home and leaving someone else to clean up the mess.

So Jesus can hang with Tax Collectors and Whores cohabitate with 12 guys for years but Marriage between to people who love each other and are of age is wrong if they are the same sex?
Why who does it harm? Can anyone say Jesus didn’t have sex his whole life? I mean his Mom was the Virgin nobody in my Sunday School called Jesus the Virgin Son of God so I’m assuming he had sex outside of Marriage with somebody.
Can the Church prove it was never with a man?

Then [the king] will say to those at his left hand, “You that are accursed, depart from me into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels;

Alright Fire and Brimstone Preach On Brother!

Yes, things were simpler them.
I can’t imagine they’d be able to do such a thing today.

The permitting & legal costs would kill the enterprise immediatly.

Which means if one was facing the King, the accursed were on the Right! /s

Yes. Pope Paul VI’s document Humanae Vitae says this (emphasis added):

Unlawful Birth Control Methods

14. Therefore We base Our words on the first principles of a human and Christian doctrine of marriage when We are obliged once more to declare that the direct interruption of the generative process already begun and, above all, all direct abortion, even for therapeutic reasons, are to be absolutely excluded as lawful means of regulating the number of children. (14) Equally to be condemned, as the magisterium of the Church has affirmed on many occasions, is direct sterilization, whether of the man or of the woman, whether permanent or temporary. (15)

Similarly excluded is any action which either before, at the moment of, or after sexual intercourse, is specifically intended to prevent procreation—whether as an end or as a means. (16)

Neither is it valid to argue, as a justification for sexual intercourse which is deliberately contraceptive, that a lesser evil is to be preferred to a greater one, or that such intercourse would merge with procreative acts of past and future to form a single entity, and so be qualified by exactly the same moral goodness as these. Though it is true that sometimes it is lawful to tolerate a lesser moral evil in order to avoid a greater evil or in order to promote a greater good,” it is never lawful, even for the gravest reasons, to do evil that good may come of it (18)—in other words, to intend directly something which of its very nature contradicts the moral order, and which must therefore be judged unworthy of man, even though the intention is to protect or promote the welfare of an individual, of a family or of society in general. Consequently, it is a serious error to think that a whole married life of otherwise normal relations can justify sexual intercourse which is deliberately contraceptive and so intrinsically wrong.

Lawful Therapeutic Means

15. On the other hand, the Church does not consider at all illicit the use of those therapeutic means necessary to cure bodily diseases, even if a foreseeable impediment to procreation should result there from—provided such impediment is not directly intended for any motive whatsoever. (19)

If a woman has cancer surgery that requires the removal of her ovaries, that’s OK under #15. But if a woman has her tubes tied to eliminate the risk of life-threatening pregnancy, that’s not OK per #14 (see the bold). Given that the alternative methods of avoiding pregnancy (condoms, the pill, or the ever-unreliable withdrawal method) are similarly condemned by #14, all that leaves the woman is the choice to forgo sex.

Portland OR has very few churches does Bend have a bunch of radical Catholics? Is the Bishop in touch with and reflecting his flocks values Bend might be more Red than Portland but I never thought it was full of women haters.
Question does this Bishop also run the churches in Seattle? If so the local Seattle press coverage should be interesting they won’t like this.

Ok the Bishop is following church rules its the Church thats crazy the Bishop is crazy for following the church. And the church wonders why nobody goes to church anymore.

Seattle has its own diocese and bishop.

At the end of the day, I think I’d prefer that the Church not fund healthcare anyway. One less reason to make donations to the Church.

American Catholic’s are not the Pope’s puppets, many have a long history of voting for progressives.

Neither is it valid to argue, as a justification for sexual intercourse which is deliberately contraceptive, that a lesser evil is to be preferred to a greater one, or that such intercourse would merge with procreative acts of past and future to form a single entity, and so be qualified by exactly the same moral goodness as these. Though it is true that sometimes it is lawful to tolerate a lesser moral evil in order to avoid a greater evil or in order to promote a greater good,” it is never lawful, even for the gravest reasons, to do evil that good may come of it (18)—in other words, to intend directly something which of its very nature contradicts the moral order, and which must therefore be judged unworthy of man, even though the intention is to protect or promote the welfare of an individual, of a family or of society in general. Consequently, it is a serious error to think that a whole married life of otherwise normal relations can justify sexual intercourse which is deliberately contraceptive and so intrinsically wrong.

The more complex the reasoning the church uses the more unsure of themselves they are.
As I understand stopping people from having kids is so evil that even if the woman might die its wrong for her to get her tubes tied?
This is such a greater evil that it trumps both Murder and Suicide because by not doing this operation a Doctor is committing murder by inaction.
By having sex when you know it could kill you and not having the operation you are playing Russian Roulette.
How is voluntary sterilization worse than Murder or Suicide ?

‘Papal infallibility’ is very recent, historically speaking, and, as Garry Wills points out, it’s only been used once (for adding the immaculate conception of Mary to doctrine) – it’s their version of a nuclear weapon.

Consequently, it is a serious error to think that a whole married life of otherwise normal relations can justify sexual intercourse which is deliberately contraceptive and so intrinsically wrong.

Sec with birth control is wrong its worse than Murder? Damm I thought Ossama had some wacky beliefs.

Remember that the Catholic Church is run by unmarried men, and that they’ve been taught that sex is only for procreation inside marriage; it isn’t supposed to be fun.

I think they need some kind of therapy, and they need to put some women into the upper reaches of the church to get some balance into it. Married men wouldn’t hurt either.

Reading these *cough* logical arguments of the church’s hurts.

I think they need a blog to argue and hammer out their ideas before they publish them the right wing Catholic Church’s echo chamber only reinforces the crazy they need people to argue with them once in awhile without being able to claim Papal infallibility when they are loosing the argument.

That isn’t so. There has always been a strong mystical streak in the Church, and those mystics, from John of the Cross to Thomas Merton, didn’t see things in dogmatic terms. And under the Good Pope John XXIII, the Church opened the doors and windows and blew out the accumulated dust of centuries. Regrettably, subsequent Popes and their acolytes closed the doors and windows, and the dust settled back over the People of God.

I was perusing the Bible for some similar ideas about illegal aliens and the ever un-popular topic of actually loving your enemies and found some good bits as well:

http://cmhmd.blogspot.com/2010/02/exodus-2221-do-not-mistreat-alien-or.html

Nice article, Peterr.

So Bishop Vasa has “cut the ties” with St. Charles Hospital, throwing the hospital into the risk of bankruptcy and eliminating the healthcare of thousands that relied on the charity and support of the church in keeping them alive.
But that’s the cost of doctrinal purity, I guess. You have to destroy the village in order that a few Bishops can make sure they get to heaven.

I guess this will be known as the Great “Vasa-ectomy” of 2010.

The hospital has been privately funded for quite a while, as the nuns who founded it turned it over to a private organization. It kept its connection to the church, however, which I suspect was part of the original deal.

From the history of the hospital:

Still, St. Charles had outgrown the downtown site by 1970. With limited land available in Bend, the hospital purchased land on the far outskirts of town. At the time, people joked the new hospital would be halfway to Burns.

The Sisters of St. Joseph were not in the position to assume the debt load of a large new facility. In 1972, the Sisters transferred all assets from the old hospital to the newly formed St. Charles Medical Center, Inc.

[snip]

The Catholic Tradition

St. Charles Bend is no longer owned or managed by a Catholic order or organization but it continues to follow the Catholic Health Directives. Whereas the parent organization – Cascade Healthcare Community – and St. Charles Redmond are secular organizations, St. Charles Bend cooperates materially with the Diocese of Baker as it relates to the Catholic Health Directives.

What has changed in the past week is that Vasa has withdrawn the church’s “sponsorship” of the hospital, so that the hospital cannot claim to be “catholic” any longer. Thus, that last section will have to be removed or drastically reworded.

When Vasa said (as I quoted above) “In practical terms there should be very little change in how St. Charles presently functions” he was speaking of the funding and health care. Both will continue as they have in the past, but the hospital will not be able to call itself Catholic.

I can’t believe the twisted logic and false arugments used by the religious apologists commenting here to justify the made up mumbo-jumbo that is being passed off as “religion”.

Come on folks, if you look hard enough you can even find examples of Nazis, Stalinists, fascists even republicans doing “good deeds”. That’s no justification to defend them or their human race regressionism.

Ain’t “doin’ god’s work” grand. These RC bishops are such power mad hypocrites it makes one want to gag…

They take a stand to take away women’s rights (they can’t even pretend tubal ligation hurts the snowflake fetus) and gay rights.

But the Church is also in favor of immigration reform and climate change reform. And against the war and the death penalty. Funny how they rarely take risky stands on that.

I take it you’ve decided that everyone else should also become an atheist?
Sorry, that’s not your right.

The problem with the Roman Catholic Church (in which I have been a member since birth) is that its hierarchy has little or nothing to do with religion per se. The Roman clergy is primarily a political organization, especially in its upper ranks.

Theological and moral issues have had little or no bearing on the decisions of the Papacy and Curia over long stretches of its history. The Princes of the Church, as they are often called, were often just that, secular princes with geopolitical power, armies, and territory. They have never accepted the loss of that status. So, in the manner of princes, conniving against each other for preferments and, ultimately, elevation to the Papal throne have been their main concerns, with supporting friendly foreign powers (Spain, Austria) a close second.

For much of the Church’s history, the actual religious, theological and moral/pastoral work was left to the universities, the monastic and preaching orders, and the regular parish priests. But, after the Church lost its real secular dominion over central Italy in 1870, it turned to aggressive diplomatizing and influence peddling of the kind that eventually produced the notorious Concordats with Mussolini and Hitler. To influence governments when it no longer had its own armies, the Papacy had to mobilize the laity behind its political priorities. So it began to exert more and more central control over the Church’s previously independent moral and theological work and thereby convert them to political purposes. It is no coincidence that the Popes had themselves declared infallible in matters of doctrine at the same time that they lost the Papal States to Victor Emmanuel, King of Italy. They now claim the power to infallibly rewrite history as well, witness the effort to canonize the architect of the above Concordats, Pius XI, despite his profound moral cowardice and general sympathy for fascism.

The current crop of Catholic bishops thus make the moral pronouncements that they do because they want to influence politics, not because they really expect to achieve any particular moral end. Tackling the nation’s divorce rate or is thus NOT a priority because neither wins the Church political friends and influence. Too many politicians get divorced and none of them wants to be mixed up in any way with the proverbial “live boy.” But, to the bishops, homosexuals and loose women (the only kind they have much knowledge of aside from their mothers) are unpopular minorities and thus offer solid, low-risk political opportunities.

In his monumental “City of God”, St. Augustine of Hippo taught that there is a City of Man–the secular world–and a City of God–the perfected, spiritual, heavenly world we strive for. The Church, the Earthly City of God, tries to look like the latter but is really part of the former. As such, it partakes of the corruption of the rest of the world. Our job is to take the Church and the World as we find them and to make them better. Thinkers like Augustine are why I am still Catholic.

I can appreciate your statement: “As such, it partakes of the corruption of the rest of the world. Our job is to take the Church and the World as we find them and to make them better. Thinkers like Augustine are why I am still Catholic.”

There is still a place for men in the Church even if the Church of agape and philios I perceive you to refer I believe mostly no longer exists. One of the reasons I say that is that an organization that can’t come to terms with women as equally worthwhile beings is an incomplete and damaged entity. Also, I have known too many ordained men and women who left as they could not possibly uphold their vows in such a self-reinforcing structure of twistedness and corruption. I might add that apparently in St. Augustine’s last sermon he said to disregard everything he had said previously and never uttered another one. Next, according to an eye witness report from a source I trust, the true Church is locked away, hidden from the world, and only lives in the Vatican library. Further, the CC and other staunch fundamentalist groups (LDS, Southern Baptist Convention, staunch fundamentalist Hindus) have worked together in “aggressive diplomatizing and influence peddling” to date (for an example, see the startling photo ops of Laura Bush at the Vatican during the previous administration). So, I am not at all optimistic about any success in reforming the CC, its companion organizations or much of the so-called American mainstream media (bank and defense contractor owned entities) as they continue to be corrupt, violence-inciting political entities here and abroad (check out a keyword search of AmericaBlog.com with the word “Uganda”). Long ago I had first-hand very disturbing run-ins with the Church so I got to see everything I needed to see to decide that organized “religion” has too many misconceptions, logical discontinuities and can’t tolerate anything but blind faith so it tends to devolve into negative behaviors resulting from the non-virtues that adherents rail against but purposely have no tools with which to excise them from their own lives. Instead, I prize a personally tested spirituality or philosophy based upon a common human ethic of happiness and basic human goodness. I think Americans need to enter the “Age of Enlightenment” by finally separating out organized religion from the state. Izzard’s implied suggestion of organized religion reduced to a hobby is a great one in my mind: “Religion ala Eddie Izzard” ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ope-1Zb5t-k ).