Catholic health care executives, bishops reach accord

WASHINGTON — In the wake of public spats between the Catholic hierarchy and health care executives, the Catholic Health Association publicly acknowledged that bishops — not doctors or hospital ethicists — have the final say on questions of medical morality.

The concession came in letters made public on Jan. 31 between Sister Carol Keehan, president and CEO of the Catholic Health Association, and Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. Disputes between health care executives and bishops have intensified as Catholic authorities wrestle with increasingly complex moral quandaries in the country’s more than 600 church-affiliated hospitals. Keehan has clashed with the bishops over last year’s health care reform law and a controversial surgery last year at an Arizona Catholic hospital that Phoenix Bishop Thomas Olmsted called an abortion. Olmsted later stripped St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center of its Catholic status and excommunicated its chief ethicist, Sister Margaret McBride.

Keehan had backed the hospital in the dispute, saying it had correctly interpreted the Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services, a set of moral guidelines written by the USCCB. In her letter, Keehan conceded that only a bishop’s interpretation of the Ethical and Religious Directives is authoritative.