Nearly two years ago, Live Action News reported that the Sisters of St. Mary (SSM) Catholic hospital chain in St. Louis, Missouri, appeared to be referring some pregnant mothers — particularly those with high-risk pregnancies or fetal anomaly diagnoses — to Hope Clinic for Women, an abortion facility just across the border in Granite City, Illinois.
John Ryan, a regular pro-life sidewalk advocate outside of Hope Clinic, has had several conversations with mothers and fathers approaching the facility who claimed they were referred by hospitals within the SSM chain. He captured many of those conversations on video, which can now be seen in a new documentary available online called “Scandal: The Catholic Culture of Death.”
John Ryan (Scandal screenshot)
According to the documentary, “To date John … and the other sidewalk counselors have documented more than two-dozen abortion referrals from Catholic hospitals in the St. Louis area.” This is problematic, because, as the documentary also notes: “Catholic hospitals, if they want to identify themselves as Catholic, are obligated to adhere to the Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services. This document, produced by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, lays out what Catholic hospitals can and cannot do.”
The Ethical and Religious Directives clearly state, “Catholic health care organizations are not permitted to engage in immediate material cooperation in actions that are intrinsically immoral, such as abortion, euthanasia, assisted suicide, and direct sterilization.”
Ryan, who is a Catholic and a Knight of Columbus, says he has been trying to stop these referrals by bringing them to the attention of various authorities, including SSM itself, the Archbishop of St. Louis, and the Knights of Columbus, who sponsor a developmental center at Cardinal Glennon Children’s Hospital, one of the hospitals apparently making the referrals.
Screenshot: Hope Clinic abortion center, Granite City, IL
As previously reported by Live Action News, the hospital chain itself denied any wrongdoing but failed to open its records and practices up to outside investigation.
The Archbishop, on the other hand, reportedly failed to respond. “I gave him all this information, I made sure he got it. I checked with the secretary, they said, ‘I assure you it’s passed on,’” Ryan told Live Action News. But to date, it appears no action has been taken by that office, which has the power to revoke the Catholic identity of the hospitals in question, which would end their tax exempt status and dry up many sources of funding made available to the hospitals because they are considered Catholic.
As for the Knights of Columbus, Ryan told Live Action News that individual members are usually horrified when they are made aware of what is happening, but leadership has been lukewarm. He said the leadership asked him “probing questions,” but that “it was all about what would this do to the Knights … It wasn’t problem solving, it wasn’t ‘let’s work together and end this thing.’”
“So you got the scandal, which is that a Catholic hospital would be doing this in the first place, and you got the scandal that covers the scandal, which is the coverup,” Ryan told Live Action News. “All these different people had the ability to shut this thing down, if they would’ve just done their job. Instead, every single one, for their own reasons, chose their organization over shutting down this totally abhorrent practice, which they all had the power to do.” According to Ryan, with regard to each of the authorities approached, “Their first concern was the system. Not the victims. The very first concern was, ‘We gotta protect our hospital,’ ‘We gotta protect our Knights, we gotta protect our developmental center…’”
Ryan told Live Action News that fundraising to make a follow-up documentary concerning these events will be commencing shortly.
