Courageous Priest

Archbishop Charles Chaput Reveals The Harsh Reality Facing Our Catholic Hospitals And Health-Care Professionals.

Archbishop Charles Chaput delivered an address to health care professionals in Houston, the following is a slightly edited, abbreviated version of the actual address.

Scattered through the Gospels are brief summaries of how Jesus and his disciples understood his mission. Here’s one of them from the Gospel of Matthew: “And Jesus went about all the cities and villages … preaching the gospel of the Kingdom and healing every disease and every infirmity” (Mt 9:35). Jesus redeemed the whole human person – mind, body and spirit.

Jesus gave this same mission to his Church. He told his apostles: “Whenever you enter a town … heal the sick in it and say to them, ‘The Kingdom of God has come near you’” (Lk 10:9). Thus, wherever a local Church was founded, Christians started ministries to the sick, especially to the weak and most vulnerable. They didn’t ask permission from the civil authorities. They didn’t do these things to show good citizenship, or because it was lucrative business. They cared for the sick because that’s what Jesus did. And that’s what he commanded his disciples to do.

Catholic Hospitals Are At A Crossroads

Our mission has brought us to a crossroads with the current national debate over health-care reform . We face big economic and philosophical questions about the viability of the Catholic health-care ministry.

What Is Your Identity & Mission As A Health Care Professional?

But I want to talk about the one question that undergirds all the others. That’s the question of your Catholic identity and your mission: Who are you? And what does it really mean to be a Catholic health-care professional?

Back To Our Roots; The Hippocratic Oath

Dr. Herbert Ratner, a Catholic and a family practice doctor who devoted his life to questions of medical ethics, believed that the ancient Hippocratic Oath sworn by physicians for 2,500 years offered another path. It could serve as a cornerstone for the identity of persons working in health care. It could be a shield from what he called bullying by the state, “the dehumanization of society and the brutalization of medicine.”2 Unfortunately, the original oath is rarely used these days.

Louis Lasagna rewrote and arguably softened it in 1964. We should also remember that while the original oath barred physicians from helping with abortions – in fact, the oath specifically rejects medical aid for abortions and physician-assisted suicide — some sources suggest that Hippocrates himself may have invented surgical tools to perform abortions. Abortion, of course, was common in the pre-Christian world.

Unfortunately, we live in a time when both of those simple words – “human” and “person” – have disputed meanings, and the idea of the “sanctity” of human life is sometimes seen as little more than romantic poetry. And this cultural confusion, fueled by trends in our science and technology, is magnified in the current debates over health-care reform.

The State Is Pushing Catholic Hospitals To Perform Abortions . . .

In a number of states, the Church has faced government attempts to press Catholic hospitals, clinics and other social service institutions into violating their religious principles. This is becoming a national pattern. In Colorado, to name just one example, lawmakers recently tried to block the sale of two local hospitals to a large Catholic hospital system unless the Catholic system agreed to demands that it arrange for abortions, sterilizations, and other so-called women’s services.

The question we should ask ourselves is this: What kind of a society would need to coerce religious believers into doing things that undermine their religious convictions — especially when those same believers provide vital services to the public.

Massachusetts, A Sign Of The Future!

Massachusetts, wanting to provide emergency contraception drugs to the victims of sexual assault, pushed through a law that requires Catholic hospitals to administer drugs even if they might act to cause an abortion.

Clearly that’s bad law and bad medicine. And it sets a dangerous precedent because it allows the government to directly interfere in the doctor-patient relationship. In effect, it dictates the exact medical procedure that doctors must follow in every case, no matter what their professional judgment might be. It requires doctors and nurses to be the enforcers of state abortion ideology.

We now often see in the actions of our public authorities the opposite of what the American Founders intended for our country. The Founders worked hard to create the structures of a limited government subordinate to civil society. Civil society is much larger and much more alive than the state. And to stay that way, it depends for its survival on the autonomy and free cooperation of its parts – families, communities, churches, synagogues, and fraternal and charitable associations. All of these entities have rights completely independent of government. Rights that precede the state.

Now how does all this relate to the very practical topic of our time together today: health-care reform and the future of the Catholic health-care ministry?

I’ll answer with a few simple facts.

1. While access to decent health care may not seem like a “right” to some people in the same sense as our rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness – reasonable people might reasonably disagree about that — the Church does see it as a right.
2. A government role in ensuring basic health care for all citizens and immigrants can be very legitimate and even required. But that doesn’t justify excluding government from helping to solve chronic problems when no other solutions work.
3. The principle of subsidiarity reminds us that problems should be solved as locally as possible.
4. No national health-care plan can be morally legitimate if it allows, even indirectly, for the killing of the unborn, or discriminatory policies and pressures against the elderly, the infirm and the disabled. Protecting the unborn child and serving the poor are not unrelated issues. They flow from exactly the same Christian duty to work for social justice.
5. The health-care reform proposals with any hope of advancing now in Washington all remain fatally flawed on the abortion issue, conscience protections and the inclusion of immigrants.

So what do you need to do as Catholic health-care professionals in the face of these challenges?

Have courage.  Trust in God.  Speak up and defend your Catholic faith with your medical colleagues.  Commit yourself to good and moral medicine.  Get involved and fight hard for the conscience rights of your fellow Catholics and their institutions.  Remember the Hippocratic Oath.  Dedicate yourselves again to being truly Christian and deeply Catholic health-care professionals.

You and I and all of us – we’re disciples first. That’s why you gave your heart and all your talent to this extraordinary vocation in the first place. Remember that as you go home today. Use up your lives for the glory of God and the dignity of your patients. You walk in the footsteps of the Healer of humanity and Redeemer of history.  In healing the sick, proclaim his Kingdom with the witness of your lives.

Full Version Here:

The Simple Truth,
If You Do Not Believe In Satan,
Then You Will Not Believe In God!

Read this edited version revealed by Archbishop Charles Chaput to the Fifth Symposium Rome: Priests and Laity on Mission.  Full Version Here

Satan Tempting Jesus

It is very odd that in the wake of the bloodiest century in history – a century when tens of millions of human beings were shot, starved, gassed and incinerated with superhuman ingenuity – even many religious leaders are embarrassed to talk about the devil. In fact, it is more than odd. It is revealing. Mass murder and exquisitely organized cruelty are not just really big “mental health” problems. They are sins that cry out to heaven for justice, and they carry the fingerprints of an Intelligence who is personal, gifted, calculating and powerful.

The devil is only unbelievable if we imagine him as the black monster of medieval paintings, or think The Inferno is intended as a literal road map to hell. Satan was very real for Jesus. He was very real for Paul and the other great saints throughout history. And he is profoundly formidable. If we want a sense of the grandeur of the Fallen Angel before he fell, the violated genius of who Satan really is, we can take a hint from the Rilke poem The Angels:

. . . when they spread their wings
they waken a great wind through the land:
as though with his broad sculptor-hands
God was turning
the leaves of the dark book of the Beginning.

This is the kind of Being – once glorious, but then consumed by his own pride — who is now the Enemy of humanity. This is the Pure Spirit who betrayed his own greatness. This is the Intellect who hates the Incarnation because through it, God invites creatures of clay like you and me to take part in God’s own divinity. There is nothing sympathetic about Satan; only tragedy and loss and enduring, brilliant anger.

In 1929 the philosopher Raissa Maritain wrote.

“Lucifer has cast the strong though invisible net of illusion upon us. He makes one love the passing moment above eternity, uncertainty above truth. He persuades us that we can only love creatures by making Gods of them. He lulls us to sleep (and he interprets our dreams); he makes us work. Then does the spirit of man brood over stagnant waters. Not the least of the devil’s victories is to have convinced artists and poets that he is their necessary, inevitable collaborator and the guardian of their greatness. Grant him that, and soon you will grant him that Christianity is unpracticable. Thus does he reign in this world.”

If we do not believe in the devil, sooner or later we will not believe in God. We cannot cut Lucifer out of the ecology of salvation. Satan is not God’s equal. He is a created being subject to God and already, by the measure of eternity, defeated. Nonetheless, he is the first author of pride and rebellion, and the great seducer of man. Without him the Incarnation and Redemption do not make sense, and the cross is meaningless. Satan is real. There is no way around this simple truth.

We live in an age that imagines itself as post-modern and post-Christian. It is a time defined by noise, urgency, action, utility and a hunger for practical results. But there is nothing really new about any of this. I think St. Paul would find our age rather familiar. For all of the rhetoric about “hope and change” in our politics, our urgencies hide a deep unease about the future; a kind of well-manicured selfishness and despair.

The Emptiness Hurts

The world around us has a hole in its heart, and the emptiness hurts. Only God can fill it. In our baptism, God called each of us here today to be his agents in that work.  Like St. Paul, we need to be “doers of the word, and not hearers only” (Jas 1:22). We prove what we really believe by our willingness, or our refusal, to act on what we claim to believe.

You Are Being Called

We have an obligation as Catholics to study and understand the world around us. We have a duty not just to penetrate and engage it, but to convert it to Jesus Christ. That work belongs to all of us equally: clergy, laity and religious. We are missionaries. That is our primary vocation; it is hardwired into our identity as Christians. God calls each of us to different forms of service in his Church. But we are all equal in baptism. And we all share the same mission of bringing the Gospel to the world, and bringing the world to the Gospel.

The Real Issue is a Crisis of Faith

Our real issue is a crisis of faith. Do we believe in God or not? Are we on fire with a love for Jesus Christ, or not? Because if we are not, nothing else matters. If we are, then everything we need in order to do God’s work will follow, because he never abandons his people.

God calls us to leave here today and make disciples of all nations. But he calls us first to love him. If we do that, and do it zealously, with all our hearts – the rest will follow.

Archbishop Charles Chaput

St. Thomas Aquinas pray for us and our Priest.

This is what Courageous Priest is all about.  Catholic Priest willing to stand strong for the Faith.

By James Tillman

PHOENIX, AZ, October 20, 2009 (LifeSiteNews.com) — In remarks delivered to the Phoenix Catholic Physician’s Guild on October 16, 2009, Archbishop Chaput of Denver condemned moral indifference in the face of the culture of death as dishonesty towards God and ruinous to America.

The archbishop began by discussing a single facet of our society: its attitude towards children with Down syndrome.

“Currently about 5,000 children with Down syndrome are born in the United States each year,” he said.  “They join a national Down syndrome population of roughly 400,000 persons. But that population may soon dwindle.  And the reason why it may decline illustrates, in a vivid way, a struggle within the American soul.”

“That struggle will shape the character of our society in the decades to come.”

Prenatal testing for Down syndrome, he continued, rather than helping parents prepare to care for their child, has become a reason for parents to kill their child.  “Studies show that more than 80 percent of unborn babies diagnosed with Down syndrome now get terminated in the womb.”

But this statistic, he continued, is but a symptom of the sickness that has spread throughout America.  The choice that the parents of an infant with Down syndrome make is the same as the choice society faces as a whole.

“The real choice in accepting or rejecting a child with special needs is between love and unlove; between courage and cowardice; between trust and fear,” he said. That’s the choice we face when it happens in our personal experience.  And that’s the choice we face as a society in deciding which human lives we will treat as valuable, and which we will not.

“Every child with Down syndrome, every adult with special needs; in fact, every unwanted unborn child, every person who is poor, weak, abandoned or homeless – each one of these persons is an icon of God’s face and a vessel of his love.  How we treat these persons – whether we revere them and welcome them, or throw them away in distaste – shows what we really believe about human dignity, both as individuals and as a nation.”

“Religion is Not Private Thing”

Catholics can no longer excuse themselves from combating this disease by saying that their religion is private and separated from every other area of their life, he continued: religion is not simply a private thing.

“Catholic public officials who take God seriously cannot support laws that attack human dignity without lying to themselves, misleading others and abusing the faith of their fellow Catholics.  God will demand an accounting.”

“God will demand an accounting”

“Catholic doctors who take God seriously cannot do procedures, prescribe drugs or support health policies that attack the sanctity of unborn children or the elderly; or that undermine the dignity of human sexuality and the family. God will demand an accounting.

“And Catholic citizens who take God seriously cannot claim to love their Church, and then ignore her counsel on vital public issues that shape our nation’s life.  God will demand an accounting.”

But the maintenance of public morality is not merely a duty to God but also to our nation, he continued.

“It would seem to be erected on the triple denial that has corrupted Western culture at its roots: the denial of metaphysical reality, of the primacy of the spiritual over the material, [and] of the social over the individual … Its most striking characteristic is its profound materialism … It has given citizens everything to live for and nothing to die for.”

“And its achievement may be summed up thus:  It has gained a continent and lost its own soul.”

The Archbishop ended, therefore, by urging men truly to act as Catholics and thereby to change the world.

“Be the best doctors, nurses and medical professionals you can be,” he said.  “Your skill gives glory to God.  But be the best Catholics you can be first.”