CHICAGO (ChurchMilitant.com) – A new report reveals the largest Catholic health care network in the United States is engaged in a host of immoral practices, including facilitating so-called sex-change operations.
On Sunday, the Lepanto Institute published a report that details the moral abominations occurring at CommonSpirit Health, the nation’s largest nonprofit health care system, with more than 1,000 facilities and 140 hospitals in 21 states (see here).
But though CommonSpirit Health has its Catholic identity from a Vatican-established entity, the LI report highlights that the organization
Performs sex-change surgery
Provides hormone “therapies” for gender-dysphoric patients
Provides puberty blockers for kids
Provides employee-benefits packages that cover the above
Dispenses all forms of contraception, including abortifacients, and
Performs elective abortion (at least one location).
CommonSpirit Health is sponsored by the Catholic Health Care Federation, which receives its authority from the Vatican’s Congregation for the Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life. “This means that direct oversight and jurisdiction over CommonSpirit Health belongs to the Apostolic See in the Vatican, alone,” explains the LI report.
“It is depraved beyond measure that CommonSpirit Health is butchering the bodies and genitals of deeply confused and vulnerable people by performing sex-change operations,” asserted LI president Michael Hichborn. “But what’s truly satanic is that this assault on the Image and Likeness of God is being done in the name of the Catholic Church!”
“God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah for their abominable acts,” he added. “What will become of our Church and our nation while this unspeakable horror is being conducted in the name of the Church?”
LI is calling upon bishops to strip CommonSpirit Health of its Catholic identity and to lead public acts of reparation.
Catholic Moral Teaching
Catholic moral teaching on contraception and abortion is immutable and clear.
The Catechism (§2271) states: “Since the first century the Church has affirmed the moral evil of every procured abortion. This teaching has not changed and remains unchangeable. Direct abortion … is gravely contrary to the moral law.”
Pope Paul VI signs Humanae Vitae
(25 July 1968)
Regarding birth control of any kind, in his encyclical Humanae Vitae, Paul VI strictly excluded “any action which either before, at the moment of, or after sexual intercourse, is specifically intended to prevent procreation — whether as an end or as a means.”
Though the Catechism does not specifically address the topic of transgenderism, it does state, “Everyone, man and woman, should acknowledge and accept his sexual identity. Physical, moral, and spiritual difference and complementarity are oriented toward the goods of marriage and the flourishing of family life” (§2333).
In 2019, the Congregation for Education addressed the topic in a document titled Male and Female He Created Them.
The document states, “Philosophical analysis also demonstrates that sexual difference between male and female is constitutive of human identity.”
It adds, “There is a need to reaffirm the metaphysical roots of sexual difference, as an anthropological refutation of attempts to negate the male–female duality of human nature, from which the family is generated.”
MFHCT also explains how the anti-metaphysical underpinnings of gender ideology distort the nature of the family.
“But if there is no pre-ordained duality of man and woman in creation, then neither is the family any longer a reality established by creation,” explains the document, adding, “likewise, the child has lost the place he had occupied hitherto and the dignity pertaining to him.”
The LI report reveals CommonSpirit Health is engaged in practices that unequivocally contradict its supposed Catholic identity.