Bishop says new hospital must obey the church

By Justine Mccarthy
Sunday Times (UK)
April 23, 2017

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/bishop-says-new-hospital-must-obey-the-church-jjbgzzn86

Bishop of Elphin, Kevin Doran

The Religious Sisters of Charity will have to obey the rules of the Roman Catholic church if they become owners of the new National Maternity Hospital (NMH) in south Dublin, according to the bishop of Elphin, Kevin Doran.

“A healthcare organisation bearing the name Catholic, while offering care to all who need it, has a special responsibility . . . to Catholic teachings about the value of human life and the dignity and the ultimate destiny of the human person,” said Doran, who chairs the hierarchy’s committee on bio-ethics.

“Public funding, while it brings with it other legal and moral obligations, does not change that responsibility.”

His statement to The Sunday Times appears to confirm warnings by Peter Boylan, the chairman of the Institute of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, that the €300m maternity hospital may not provide services such as sterilisation, infertility treatment, gender reassignment surgery and abortion.

Doran’s statement also echoes a warning by Tom Lynch, chairman of the Ireland East Hospital Group, which includes St Vincent’s, that locating the maternity hospital on its campus would raise issues of medical ethics. Lynch told Jim Breslin, secretary-general of the Department of Health, that canon law obliged a hospital on Catholic land to operate by Catholic rules.

Doran referred to three tenets of canon law which decree that land held by religious institutions is “ecclesiastical property” over which the Pope has “primacy of governance”. He said he was speaking “in general terms” as the NMH is not in his diocese and he was unfamiliar with the legal relationship between the Sisters of Charity and St Vincent’s Healthcare Group (SVHG).