Secularists might be surprised to learn that the Church is the largest single supplier of health care and education on the planet, the principal glue of civil society in Africa, the strongest bulwark of opposition to the caste system in India, and a leading player in global campaigns for sustainable living. It provides almost the only charitable presence in Chechnya, and other blackspots often forgotten by the rest of the world.
–Rupert Shortt, “There are now almost as many Roman Catholics as citizens of China ”“ why?” in the Times Literary Supplement, April 8, 2009
Sad to say but the church now has very little presence in the health care industry in the USA. I wonder if it were still as strong as in the 1960’s what its impact could have been on the current attempt at legislation?
Brad M
One wishes that North Americans and Europeans, especially young ones, who like to trash “the Church” and “Christians” as “irrelevant to what’s really going on” would know of the many missions to suffering people in less affluent nations that have long been going on in the name of Christ.
Apparently (I’m quoting from another commenter on another thread) the Catholic Church operates 600 hospitals in the US. Is that very little presence?
I don’t like rounded figures but I must admit that the National Council of Catholic Bishops on their website says in one place there are 615 and in another 573 so who knows. I just know there seem to be a lot less than in olden times, at least in my neck of the woods in SW Ohio.
TACit, the RCC does have a long history of operating hospitals in the US. However, as a physician who’s been on staff at one, I can tell you that the degree of allegiance and adherence to Catholic doctrine and teaching varies. In my experience, it’s like saying that St. X University is “a university in the Catholic tradition,” (or worse yet, “in the Jesuit tradition”), and then finding that it tolerates all manner of teaching that plays fast and loose (or directly contravenes) RC doctrine and teaching. Like, for instance, performing sterilization procedures.
I think a lot has to do with the hospital’s administration, how involved in hospital policy the sponsoring religious order remains (often nowadays, not much), and how much oversight the diocesan bishop chooses to exert.