Does Leo Varadkar want to close all of Ireland’s Catholic hospitals?

Jun 15, 2018 by Jill

by Fr Alexander Lucie-Smith, Catholic Herald:

More grim news from Ireland. The Taoiseach has given an assurance that Catholic hospitals will be forced to provide abortions, as this magazine reports. While individuals will be able to opt out of providing abortions, institutions will not.

It is not quite clear how this proposed legislation will work. Presumably, if a publicly funded Catholic hospital refuses to provide abortions, then it will lose its funding. But what will happen if all the employees at a Catholic hospital choose to opt out? And will a Catholic hospital be free to choose applicants for jobs on the basis of whether they are conscientious objectors or not? If they are not able to do so, then the hospital would pretty soon cease to be Catholic.

That a Catholic-owned (albeit state funded) hospital will be forced to provide abortions means that the Church faces a stark choice. It will perhaps be able to fight this decision and have it overturned in the courts. But if that fails, then there is only one thing to do, and that is to close down the hospitals. For it is simply impossible for a Catholic hospital to provide abortions. Indeed once it does it ceases to be Catholic, ipso facto.

Read here

If Irish Catholic hospitals are forced to perform abortions, the Roman Catholic Church should close every one of them by Carl Jacobs, Archbishop Cranmer’s website