Model for Catholic health care should be Jesus, official says

National Catholic Reporter, July 3, 1998 by Pamela Schaeffer

NEW ORLEANS -- As Catholic health care institutions struggle with growing pressures related to money and mission, the only sure sign of success, according to the new president of the Catholic Health Association, is whether the stories people tell about their experiences are "like the stories people would have told about Jesus" or about the visionaries in Catholic health care of the past.

"As we seek to strengthen our identity, let us have the courage and humility to truly hear the stories of those we serve," said Fr. Michael Place, the first priest to serve as president of the association in 30 years.

Place, appointed to the post Feb. 1 by the association board of trustees, spoke at its annual national meeting in New Orleans in June.

Catholic identity, he said, is not a product of quality medical care or justice in the workplace or compassionate care of dying people. Rather, he said, it is assured when people are helped "to find hope in the midst of pain" and when others recognize Jesus in the work that Catholic institutions do.

Fr. Richard McCormick, Catholic ethicist retired from the University of Notre Dame, recently warned Catholic health care administrators that a business mentality is eroding the distinctive character of their institutions. The latest statistics, he said, show that Catholic hospitals devote only 2.8 percent of their revenues to charity, a figure he described as lower than for other nonprofit hospitals, secular or religious.

The theme for the national meeting here, "Mission and the Marketplace," was an acknowledgment that bottom-line demands put identity at risk. In seven plenary sessions and a variety of workshops, speakers focused on the challenges, which include fierce competition for health care dollars combined with funding cutbacks by insurers and government programs.

But Place said in an interview with NCR that he was more optimistic than McCormick about the ability of institutions to respond in ways that "preserve the mission." Place said the first preference of Catholic institutions should be "to attend to those who have not." At the same time, he defended the huge reserves that some hospital systems have accumulated as necessary for floating bonds for future growth.

A Wall Street Journal article on Jan. 7 that discussed ethical questions raised by a $2 billion reserve held by the Daughters of Charity National Health System (NCR, Jan 23) "missed the soul" of Catholic health care, he said.

In his opening address to the assembly, Place, who served under the late Cardinal Joseph Bernardin in Chicago , as senior adviser on health care policy, said he was acutely aware of the "baggage" he carried to his new post as "a priest and a diocesan bureaucrat."

Preceding his talk, a half-hour multimedia presentation, laced with teasing and capped with a solemn commissioning ceremony, was designed to convince the assembly of Place's qualifications and humanness. Fr. Sammie L. Maletta, vicar general of the Gary, Ind., diocese and a good friend of Place, said Place's penchant for pairing his Roman collar with French cuffs assured him of winning GQ magazine's award for "best-dressed cleric."

Maletta, who now co-owns a house and shares a quarter-acre garden in Michigan City, Ind., with Place, assured health care leaders that, though Place has a "monster intellect" and sometimes enjoys intimidating people, "he does grow on you. And it's worth letting that happen." His own friendship with Place developed after Maletta organized a boycott of Place's seminary classes, because, Maletta said, Place was "the toughest teacher we ever had."

Place told NCR that he had been "profoundly shaped" by his years under Cardinal Bernardin. "My prayer is always that I can be in some way as good as he was," he said. "The test for me will be whether, at the end of my service, others would say, `Joe would be proud of him.'"

In a second talk, Place said one problem for the association is a perception among some bishops that its advice comes out of some perspective that is "ideologically skewed on some spectrum of theology" -- that is, tainted by identification with either the left or the right.

Another, he said, is that bishops differ on ethical questions affecting hospital practice. The differences "may be healthy for us," he said, "but it's a problem when questions involve systems that cross two or more dioceses."

The Catholic Health Association, based in St. Louis and supported by some 1,200 member organizations, was founded by Jesuit priests at St. Louis University in 1915. It was headed by priests until 1968, then by two nuns and, for the past 18 years, by Place's immediate predecessor, layman John E. Curley Jr.