NEW YORK (America Media) – The campaign against Catholic health care affects the church and the communities that they serve.

The importance of Catholic hospitals:

In myriad ways, the church and Catholic women religious in particular had a hand in bringing about American health care as we know it.

Today, one in six patients receives medical care at a Catholic institution. According to the Catholic Health Association, there are 649 Catholic-sponsored hospitals in the United States employing nearly 750,000 people. For leaders in Catholic health care, the growth of these hospitals at a time of economic uncertainty is to be celebrated. It is a sign that these institutions, many of which were founded by women religious to serve the most needy, continue to thrive in the 21st century.

“One of the things about Catholic hospitals is they tend to have a mission to help the poor—the preferential option, so to speak—and it’s not an accident that a lot of urban hospitals happen to be Catholic,” Eric Rassbach, an attorney with the public interest firm Becket Law, said. “One of the main groups that would be impacted by having Catholic hospitals shoved out of health care in this country would be poor people.”

The campaign against these health care institutions has high stakes not just for the church but also for underserved communities. If the American Civil Liberties Union is successful in pressing one or more of its suits, “it very may well drive Catholic hospitals out of providing medical care,” said Kevin Theriot, senior counsel and vice president at the public interest law firm Alliance Defending Freedom.

What is the A.C.L.U.’s attitude toward Catholic hospitals?

“The A.C.L.U. is trying to enforce its own orthodoxy on moral issues as they see them,” said Hillary Byrnes, assistant general counsel at the U.S.C.C.B. “It’s really unfortunate, but they’re trying to essentially force Catholic hospitals to not be Catholic anymore.”

For the A.C.L.U., the fact that faith-based hospitals are prevalent—providing the only source of hospital care in some locations—makes them more of a target for lawsuits. In its 2013 report “Miscarriage of Medicine,” the organization wrote that the “number of Catholic acute-care hospitals has been increasing rapidly” and that this is a problem: “With the rise of Catholic hospitals has come the increasing danger that women’s reproductive health care will be compromised by religious restrictions.”

Does the A.C.L.U.’s treatment of Catholic hospitals reflect a shift in its guiding principles? 

The A.C.L.U. website still says religious liberty is a “fundamental freedom” that “can’t be taken away, even by ‘majority rule.’” So how is it that the same organization is now in the business of repeatedly suing Catholic hospitals to force them to perform procedures to which the church is morally opposed?

The group has also been described as moving from broad-based civil libertarianism to an agenda more closely aligned with the Democratic Party. Mr. Glasser and the other dissenters “saw [the new executive director] transforming the organization that once defended the right of Nazis to march on Skokie into just another liberal interest group, money-hungry and cowed by political correctness,” Michelle Goldberg explained in The American Prospect in 2009.

The changes might be characterized as a shift in focus toward civil rights and away from civil liberties.

Read the complete article at Americamagazine.org.

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