OLMSTED, KEEHAN AND MORAL AUTHORITY

"The Catholic Health Association has once again found itself at odds with Church authority– this time, over Bishop Thomas J. Olmsted's decision to revoke the Catholic status of a hospital that admitted to serious ethics violations, including a highly-publicized abortion.

“Catholic Healthcare West and its system hospitals are valued members of the Catholic Health Association,” said that group's president, Sister Carol Keehan. Her remarks came less than 24 hours after the Bishop of Phoenix stripped one of those hospitals, St. Joseph's in Phoenix, of its Catholic affiliation."
Catholic News Agency

Sister Keehan, of health care bill fame, should be the next one on the list when it comes time to deal with dissent in the Church. She has become the very public face of the evil that has infected the Church here in America. She refuses to bow her head to lawful authority, instead proclaiming her personal beliefs as truth, giving cover for all those that want the Church to fail. Many of the faithful are being lost because of "religious" like her!

"Bishop Olmsted, in consultation with his own diocesan medical board, concluded that the abortion was a direct violation of the Church's ethical health care guidelines. He also accused the hospital and its parent company of “formally cooperating” in the management and administration of a government program that offers abortion, birth control, and sterilization procedures at other hospitals.

Sr. Keehan, however, opined that Catholic Healthcare West facilities were “well-known” for a “long and stellar history in the protection of life at all stages.” Her brief statement did not address the company's alleged cooperation with government-funded abortion and sterilization.

But she did defend St. Joseph's decision to perform the abortion. “They had been confronted with a heartbreaking situation,” she stated. “They carefully evaluated the patient's situation and correctly applied the Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services to it, saving the only life that was possible to save.”
Catholic News Agency

While the staff at St. Josephs was reviewing the Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services they must have dropped the page with this paragraph on the floor:

"Abortion (that is, the directly intended termination of pregnancy before viability or the directly intended destruction of a viable fetus) is never permitted. Every procedure whose sole immediate effect is the termination of pregnancy before viability is an abortion, which, in its moral context, includes the interval between conception and implantation of the embryo. Catholic health care institutions are not to provide abortion services, even based upon the principle of material cooperation. In this context, Catholic health care institutions need to be concerned about the danger of scandal in any association with abortion providers."

How can she say, with a straight face, that anyone in the hospital paid even the slightest attention to these guidelines? They were looking for ways to parse the meaning to justify their decision to kill a child, a decision I feel confident was already arrived at before the guidelines were consulted.

"...two obstetrician-gynecologists from the Diocese of Phoenix's Medical Ethics Department said Sr. Keehan was misrepresenting both the facts of the St. Joseph's Hospital case, and the ethical principles of Catholic health care.

According to those principles, doctors may perform a necessary and non-abortive medical procedure in order to treat a serious illness, even if it has the secondary effect of harming or killing an unborn child. However, the pregnancy itself can never be regarded as an “disease,” nor may a doctor perform an abortion as a means of treating a different condition.

“It goes back to the basic issue that you can never do an evil, to achieve a good,” Dr. William Chavira told CNA on Dec. 22. “The act is inherently evil.”

Dr. Chavira is a practicing obstetrician and gynecologist who also serves on the Phoenix Diocese's medical ethics committee...

...Dr. Clinton Leonard, another OB-GYN who belongs to the medical ethics board in Bishop Olmsted's diocese, stated to CNA on Dec. 22 that Sr. Keehan and other defenders of St. Joseph's were attempting to distract the public from a fundamental moral principle.

“They're making it too complex,” he said. “It's really a simple issue: the ends never justify the means. And the means that they used was a direct abortion,” Dr. Leonard stated. “That's not a treatment for pulmonary hypertension.”

“I would do everything possible to offer her cardiac support,” Dr. Leonard said, when asked what he would regard as an appropriate treatment under the circumstances. “If it's pulmonary hypertension, generally you use medications that are going to reduce the work that the heart has to do.”

In response to the assertion of Sr. Keehan and others, who regard the woman as having been on the brink of death, Dr. Leonard said it was “in debate, whether or not her life was at that point.”

But, he clarified, even under those circumstances, authoritative Catholic teaching would not have permitted the hospital to consider abortion as a form of necessary medical treatment. Pope John Paul II's encyclical “Evangelium Vitae” stated that “the deliberate decision to deprive an innocent human being of his life is always morally evil and can never be licit ... (even) as a means to a good end.”"
Catholic News Agency

In the end this issue comes down to whether or not the good Sister supports church teaching or not. It's obvious that she is misrepresenting the situation regarding this particular incident at St. Josephs and it seems that, based on her statement that St. Joseph and its parent company, Catholic Health Care West are "...valued members of the Catholic Health Association...", she is more than happy to overlook the history of abuses, not only against Church authority but also against the moral order perpetrated by this consortium.

Keehan has connections to Network, a Catholic social justice lobbying group that is connected to extreme, Progressive causes, not the least of which is the Catholic Campaign for Human Developement, which, of course, is part of the USCCB.

In the words of Sir Walter Scott: "Oh what a tangled web we weave, When first we practise to deceive."

She teamed with Network to write the letter in support of the Obama health care bill that gave cover to many wavering Catholic politicians, such as Bart Stupak, and allowed them to convince themselves that voting for the bill was morally allowable. This is what George Wesolek, director of the Office of Public Policy and Social Concern for the Archdiocese of San Francisco, had to say about Sister Keehan's letter:

“For years, most of the leadership of the LCWR (Leadership Conference of Women Religious) and the Catholic hospitals (most of which are owned by these very same LCWR leaders) have been advancing a view of Catholic social teaching that reflects a vision that they learned in the 60s and 70s – a tired feminism that distorts the role of women and has at its center the freedom of women to ‘choose’ to kill the infants in their womb if they so desire… Thus, the sisters can say with a straight face that the current health care legislation is ‘life-affirming.’ They ignore or claim as ‘false’ what the bishops and every pro-life institution in the country has recognized as a flawed bill that will advance abortion…”
California Catholic

So, what do we have? We have a Sister that refuses to live according to her vows, fighting to replace Church teaching with the hippie/feminist lies of the '60's. We have Progressive groups hiding under the banner of orthodoxy spreading lies and distortions among the faithful, most dangerously among children and the poorly educated, the sick and the poor, the groups least likely to be able to sort out fact from fiction. We have a Church hierarchy trying to discipline Keehan while at the same time working with these same Progressive groups to enrich the coffers of both while spreading error and heresy.

In other words, what we have here is rot and decay, corruption and collusion. We have a Church in America that has become less about truth and more about Progressivism and Social Justice, both offsprings of the Marxist ideology condemned by every Pope since Pius IX.

What we have is a Church on the brink of collapse. What we have is a situation similar to that time in the early part of the 16th century when the heretic Martin Luther tore Christendom in two because the Church opened itself to its own destruction through its involvement in evil.

The Church in America has no moral authority today because it refuses to act morally. Nothing will happen to Sister Keehan and her merry band of discontents. Not one damned thing!

Bishop Olmsted has done the right thing in stripping St. Joseph of its Catholic identity. If the Bishops at the USCCB had any intention of supporting him they would distance themselves from the groups that support the hospital and defy the Bishop and work to see that all those that refuse to obey lawful Church authority in this instance are punished, very publicly, by their Bishop.

Until the heads begin to roll the malcontents will feel free to spread their vile distortions.

BISHOPS, MAN UP!! For the good of the faithful and the Church. Clean up your group, the USCCB, and seize the moral high ground. If you don't, very shortly you won't have a Church to lead.