Government and market forces have fundamentally transformed the religious healthcare sector. Religious healthcare organizations are struggling to define their identities and determine what it is that makes them different and what implications the differences have for the delivery of social services and for public life. In response to these questions, the defenders of traditional Catholic healthcare make a variety of responses that first defend the continued relevance of the major institutions of Catholic healthcare, especially its hospitals, and second, specify reforms (...) to make these institutions even more relevant to the new healthcare system. This essay argues that these defenses are inadequate to that challenge and that the reforms proposed are too timid. Catholic healthcare needs a better theoretical account of its mission and more creative institutional adaptations. (shrink)

There is a tendency to see the current challenges to Catholic health care ministry as unprecedented, and the particular shape they take certainly is. But there has always been pressure. The reason is simple: whatever the dominant political, economic, or medical system of a given time and place, Catholic identity must always be at an ethical angle. Catholics faithful to Jesus' words and deeds are “resident aliens” in every society.