Roman Catholic Bishops Issue Mandate on Comatose Patients

The Chronicle also revealed that

A previous directive let Catholic hospitals and doctors decide whether the burdens on the patient outweighed the benefits of prolonging life. The bishops said the new policy was guided by “Catholic teaching against euthanasia” and by John Paul’s observation that providing food and water “always represents a natural means of preserving life, not a medical act.”

While The Chronicle opines that the new directive “plunges the bishops into another health care controversy, on the heels of their lobbying for tight restrictions on abortion coverage in health legislation pending in Congress,” Roman Catholic hospital officials maintain that the November decree is not rigid and leaves room for accommodating patients’ wishes.

As The Chronicle pointed out though, the question arises whether the bishops’ order creates a legal conflict for the hospitals.  Barbara Coombs Lee, president of Compassion & Choices — California, an organization that advocates for the right of terminally ill patients to make life-or-death decisions, argues that the bishops’ order “fails to respect settled law that empowers patients with the right to refuse or direct the withdrawal of life-prolonging care.  It will apply irrespective of your religious faith, your stated wishes in an advance directive, or the instructions of your family.”

Catholic hospital organizations disagree.  They counter that the decree itself does not require life-sustaining care that would be “excessively burdensome for the patient” or would cause “significant physical discomfort.”   According to the organizations, if those exemptions do not apply, a hospital would send a patient elsewhere rather than violate his or her expressed wishes.  The Chronicle quotes Lori Dangberg, spokeswoman for the Alliance of Catholic Health Care, which represents California’s 55 Roman Catholic hospitals, as saying that “If it was unresolvable … we would transfer the [patients] or find some other means to accommodate them.”

This controversy puts into sharp focus a current conflict between the law and religion.  Is Barbara Coombs Lee correct when she argues that the Roman Catholic Church is failing to respect settled law, or are the Catholics merely following the doctrines and teachings of their faith in their provision of healthcare to the public?  I side with the Roman Catholics on this one — and I would do so even if I were not an ordained minister of religion.  Any religious organization that provides healthcare or any other type of service to the public should not provide such service at the expense of its deeply-held religious beliefs.  This principle applies to the Roman Catholics, Seventh-day Adventists, Jews, Methodists, Muslims — every religious organization that provides services to the public.  If Lori Dangberg is being truthful — and I have no reason to believe anything to the contrary — the Roman Catholic hospitals would be willing to relocate to other institutions those patients who have expressed their wishes to discontinue artificial nutrition and hydration.  This sounds like a reasonable compromise to me.

VEJ