Opinion: Catholic hospitals shouldn’t be forced to secularize

The “Holy Family” window at Historic Leith Church, 419498 Tom Thomson Lane, Leith, Ont. Photo by Peter J. Thompson/National Post

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The Sisters of St. Martha have handed over the hospital they managed in Antigonish for 120 years. Their leader, Sister Brendalee Boisvert, said the timing felt right. It was their choice, made freely.

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A recent Globe and Mail column took this moment to make a different argument. The author, André Picard, wants every Catholic hospital in Canada to either give up its beliefs or leave health care. He suggests cutting public funding to any that refuse.

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The column briefly acknowledges Catholic history. It praises the Augustinian Sisters and admits that Catholic hospitals provided most health care in Canada for three centuries. It even notes that faith and ritual can play a key role in healing.

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This is the argument’s main issue. It admires what the church created but rejects the faith behind it.

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This way of thinking has deep roots in Quebec. The Quiet Revolution kept the church’s institutions and set the church aside. The province’s hospitals, schools and colleges were built on the foundation of religious orders — orders that moved out when a new secularism moved in. Quebec still marks the feast day of Saint John the Baptist as its national holiday but doesn’t remember why.

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Jeanne Mance came to Ville Marie in 1642 to care for the sick. Marguerite d’Youville and the Grey Nuns took in Montreal’s poor and dying. The Sisters of St. Martha opened their hospital in Antigonish in 1906. None of them did this at the behest of the government. They did it in faithfulness to Christ’s lesson: “inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these My brethren, you did it to Me.”

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Faithfulness to Jesus’s lessons also means discerning the limits of real care. Faithfulness means nurses and doctors in these hospitals will not perform abortions. Faithfulness means they will not provide MAID. These choices for a faith-inspired vision of care and thoughtful moral limits come from the same root. You cannot keep one and remove the other.

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The column’s main point is that only individuals have conscience and rights, not institutions.

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This is plainly false. We certainly expect our institutions — corporations, universities and courts — to display moral fibre and moral leadership. We rightly criticize them when they fall short. Canada’s Catholic hospitals were founded on the nuns’ faith-based moral vision. They were staffed and funded for generations by the Catholic faithful and have thrived under governance informed by Catholic teaching. If these have no conscience and no rights, who and what does?

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People do not live only as individuals. They belong to families, parishes, congregations and groups. Edmund Burke called these the “little platoons” of society. A Catholic hospital is one of these groups. Nurses, doctors, donors, volunteers and religious sisters all share a belief about the purpose of medical care. If you deny the hospital the right to act on that belief, you deny it to each of them, too.