From partnering with an organization that provides transgender surgeries and abortion services, to revising its policy on who can receive Communion, leaders in the faith community are concerned about prominent forces within the Catholic Church that appear to be compromising and even partnering with those who espouse a radically pro-abortion, pro-transgender ideology.
According to Michael Hichborn president of the Lepanto Institute, “there is an attempt to transition” the Church.
As explained on its website, “The Lepanto Institute for the Restoration of All Things in Christ is a research and education organization dedicated to the defense of the Catholic Church against assaults from without as well as from within.”
Abortion
The most astonishing shift in the Catholic Church may have to do with abortion. Although the Church’s official stance on abortion has never changed, critics point to a new willingness by individuals high in the Church to compromise with organizations and individuals who publicly espouse or promote abortion.The most recent example is the partnering of a huge Catholic health care network with a women’s health organization that has publicly advertised its goal of providing abortion services.
CommonSpirit Health is the world’s largest Catholic health care network and the second-largest nonprofit hospital system in the United States.
CommonSpirit announced its partnership with Tia Women’s Health on March 31, 2021, calling the union a “first-of-its-kind partnership to create a new front door to healthcare for women.”
As the press release explained, “The initial Tia-CommonSpirit pilot” would launch virtually in Spring 2021, followed by a “brick-and-mortar” clinic in Phoenix “with expansions in Arizona and other CommonSpirit markets over the next few years.”
Two years prior, “Ask Tia” appears to have telegraphed its plan to use the pending union to provide abortion services.
In a March 31, 2021 statement by CommonSpirit, Carolyn Witte, the co-founder and CEO of Tia, was quoted saying CommonSpirit is “the ideal partner” to help Tia spread its “model” to a national level and enable them to be recognized for “clinical excellence, and an industry-leading commitment to health equity.”
Transgender Services
As the National Catholic Register reported on July 13, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) asked its Committee on Doctrine to address the issue of transgender surgeries and hormone treatments—and their incompatibility with Church teaching—for an update to the bishops’ “Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services" (ERD) (pdf).The report identified 45 facilities, operating as subsidiaries of CommonSpirit under the names Dignity Health and Virginia Mason Franciscan Health, that provide one or more services including transgender care, sex-change surgeries, employee health care benefits that cover such services, abortion, contraception, or surgical sterilization.
In response to the Lepanto findings, an article by Catholic News Agency noted, “Due to the complexities of Catholic health care systems today, the bishops’ directives may not be easy to enforce.”
The report made special mention of Saint Francis Memorial Hospital in San Francisco, a secular hospital (despite its name) that has aligned itself with CommonSpirit Health. Saint Francis was a pioneer in gender surgery and continues to be a leader in the field.
Peter Marlow, executive director for communications and media relations at the Archdiocese of San Francisco, insisted that “CommonSpirit Health is a Catholic hospital system and has only Catholic hospitals in it.”
However, he did admit that “When this alignment was set up, a special carve-out was made for the non-Catholic hospitals that would continue to do direct sterilizations.”
“It is run by a separate oversight board, and the revenues stay separate,” Mr. Marlow said.
Tia Health does provide abortion services and referrals for abortion services.
It also confirmed—under the itemized list disclosing “Grants and Other Assistance to Organizations, Governments and Individuals in the United States”—that CommonSpirit funded the non-Catholic hospitals.
Mr. Marlow did concede that the matter of transgender service poses a conflict.
“Transgender surgeries are a new issue not originally conceived in the ERDs,” he said “The agreement provided that other ethical and religious issues in the future could be included in the ERDs among those that the non-Catholic hospitals do not perform. This has just now come to light, so it has to be looked into.”
Communion
During a November 2021 meeting of the USCCB in Baltimore, Maryland, the bishops passed a controversial 35-page document called “The Mystery of the Eucharist in the Life of the Church” (pdf), elucidating the Church’s stance on who should receive Holy Communion.On page 21, the document says, “Lay people who exercise some form of public authority have a special responsibility to form their consciences in accord with the Church’s faith and the moral law, and to serve the human family by upholding human life and dignity.”
On page 24 it says, “whatever is opposed to life itself, such as any type of murder, genocide, abortion, euthanasia or willful self-destruction, whatever violates the integrity of the human person.”
The document followed months of speculation that it would offer clear guidance empowering individual bishops to deny Communion to Catholics who publicly disagree with church teaching on abortion.
The question had lingered since 2004, when Democrat John Kerry, a Catholic who supported abortion, ran for president. At that time the USCCB, under the leadership of then-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, approved what became known as the “McCarrick Doctrine,” a compromise that did not equivocally deny Communion to pro-abortion politicians.
In 2019, Mr. McCarrick was defrocked over charges of sexual abuse.
However, although on the surface the new USCCB document reiterates the Catholic Church’s traditional teaching on Holy Communion, public sin, and who should and should not receive the sacrament, Mr. Hichborn suggests that there is a subtle emphasis that continues to give decision-making power to individual priests on whether or not to deny Communion to public pro-abortion figures.
While the document states, “Reception of Holy Communion in such a situation is also likely to cause scandal for others,” it later says, “It is the special responsibility of the diocesan bishop to work to remedy situations that involve public actions at variance with the visible communion of the Church and the moral law.”
While they were not mentioned by name, Mr. Hichborn said the new document was likely crafted for President Joe Biden and other Catholic politicians, like former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who have publicly voiced their support of abortion.
“Canon Law 915 says those who are under interdict, excommunicated or obstinately persist in grave, manifest sin are not to be admitted to Communion,” he explained. “Canon Law 916 says if you are aware of any mortal sin on your soul you are not to approach for Communion.”
So while the latter “puts the impetus on the individual to refrain from receiving Holy Communion,” he said the prior “places the onus on the one distributing Communion.”
“Under those conditions, it’s pretty clear,” he said. “The law says you are not to provide Communion to people under these circumstances.”
In one notable instance, San Francisco’s Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone cited the diocesan bishop’s responsibility in May 2022 when he publicly barred Ms. Pelosi from receiving Communion.
The USCCB
According to its website, the USCCB is “an assembly of the hierarchy of bishops who jointly exercise pastoral functions on behalf of the Christian faithful of the United States and the U.S. Virgin Islands.” Its purpose, among others, is to “organize and conduct religious, charitable and social welfare work at home and abroad,” and “to care for immigrants.”Because of its name, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, many believe the organization is part of and speaks for the Catholic Church.
“The USCCB, while it has the word ‘Catholic’ in it, is not Catholic by any means, shape, or form,” he said. “It’s a political lobbying arm here in the states and that’s all it engages in. It does not express anything about ‘The Faith.” It has no binding authority when it comes to ’The Faith.' No bishop is bound to follow anything that comes out of the USCCB.”
Mr. Voris is the founder and president of St. Michael’s Media/Church Militant, described on its website as “a media enterprise established to address the serious erosion of the Catholic faith in the last 50 years.”
Funding
It is the opinion of Mr. Voris that the Church’s focus on “the poor” began around 1968 when the Catholic Church was introduced to liberation theology, which affirmed “the rights of the poor” and suggested “that industrialized nations enriched themselves at the expense of developing countries.”“That’s the driving force behind all of this,” he suggested. “Immigration, climate change, social justice, it’s all centered around the pretense of caring for the poor.”
According to an Aug. 24, 2021 report by investigative journal The Pillar—which describes itself as “a Catholic media project”— a significant portion of the USCCB’s revenue comes from taxpayer-funded, government grants.
Community development grants offered by the USCCB range between $25,000 and $75,000. Grant amounts for Economic Development range between $25,000 and $75,000.
“In keeping with their strategic nature, these grants are intended for campaign-style initiatives of significant scale, with focused time-specific goals of regional or national importance.”
‘You Have to Be Faithful’
Priests for Life founder (formerly Rev.) Frank Pavone is familiar with Mr. Hichborn’s work and is not surprised by his findings, especially regarding “the compromises” the Catholic Church has made on “key moral issues.”In December 2022, Mr. Pavone was dismissed from the clergy for “blasphemous communications on social media” and “persistent disobedience of the lawful instructions of his diocesan bishop.”
The Catholic Church, he explained, has a lot of churches and charities that require millions to maintain.
“You’ve always got to be raising funds,” he said. “In order to raise funds you have to please the donors, and getting government funds means you have to please the government. But you have to be faithful to the moral truth. Even if you’re going to alienate the government or other donors.”
One way of remaining faithful to that moral truth, he suggests, is to stand firm on “keeping the purity of our moral witness to society that we do not cooperate in any way with the killing of children by abortion.”
“If you have to explain why it’s right, something is wrong,” he said. “People have to come away inspired, not confused.”
