Opinion: Catholic hospitals shouldn’t be forced to secularize

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.”

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.

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

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?

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.

The Supreme Court of Canada has recognized this. In Loyola High School v. Quebec, it held that religious freedom has a communal dimension. In Mouvement laïque québécois v. Saguenay, it ruled that state neutrality means government “must neither favour nor hinder any particular belief,” including “non-belief.”

Taking away funding from hospitals because they are Catholic does not meet that standard. It is not neutral. It puts the government on one side of a moral issue and punishes those who disagree.

Picard claims that not offering a procedure is the same thing as discrimination. But a Catholic hospital does not perform MAID for anyone, whether they are Catholic or atheist. It treats every patient who comes in, no matter their beliefs, and follows the same ethical standards for all. That is the opposite of discrimination.

This is not a problem of access either. Over 15,000 Canadians received MAID in 2023. Transfer arrangements are available and even the column admits that workarounds already exist.

So, what is the real complaint?

The real complaint is that these institutions still exist. Somewhere in Canada, the Catholic Church still says no. For some secular individuals like Picard, that is unacceptable.

And there is a precedent for removing them. In British Columbia, the Delta Hospice Society would not allow MAID on its premises. The province ended its funding and expropriated a donor-funded facility. This could happen across the country.

Canada is a pluralist country, which means there should be space for institutions with different beliefs. The Sisters of St. Martha chose to leave. Other Catholic hospitals should be free to choose differently.

Picard says he respects what the church built. He should also respect the reasons behind it.

National Post

Dan Robertson is the founder of ORB Advocacy and a parishioner of St. Michael’s Cathedral-Basilica in Toronto.

Lucas Vivas, MD is a former president of the Canadian Federation of Catholic Physicians and Societies.