The following is a Catholic Action League of Massachusetts news release…
Saint Elizabeth’s Medical Center in Brighton—the flagship institution of the former Caritas Christi/Steward Health Care chain of Catholic hospitals in the Archdiocese of Boston—has been sold to the Boston Medical Center, which performs more abortions than any other Bay State hospital.
According to the Massachusetts Department of Public Health Induced Termination of Pregnancy Report, Boston Medical Center was responsible for 1085 procured abortions in 2022 (the last year for which statistics are available).
Only Planned Parenthood and two other abortion clinics kill more pre-born children in the Commonwealth than BMC. It performs surgical abortions through the second trimester, and administers abortion pills to women through the tenth week of gestation.
Boston Medical Center also performs a whole range of “Gender Affirming” surgeries and sterilizations, does genetic screenings, distributes contraceptives and engages in In Vitro Fertilizations.
Following the collapse of Steward Health Care, the approval of the sale by a federal bankruptcy court, and state seizure of the property by eminent domain, BMC assumed ownership of Saint Elizabeth’s on October 1st.
That date marked the end of 161 years of acute Catholic medical care in eastern Massachusetts. Unlike Steward, the new owners will not be bound by contractual agreements to retain the Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.
That means that the hospital will be secularized.
Boston Medical Center also acquired a second former Caritas/Steward hospital, Good Samaritan Medical Center in Brockton.
In August, the website of the Archdiocese of Boston deleted all references to the now former Catholic hospital system. Its news section contains no report, comment or explanation on the ending of more than a century and a half of archdiocesan affiliated Catholic health care in six Massachusetts counties.
The Catholic Action League called the transfer of Saint Elizabeth’s and Good Samaritan to Boston Medical Center “a scandal, a tragedy and a crime.”
Catholic Action League Executive Director C. J. Doyle made the following comment:
Two long serving Catholic medical centers, founded by faithful Christians and dedicated to the Author of Life, will now become part of the Culture of Death.
The shameful, slow motion destruction of the former Caritas hospitals, from 2008 to 2024, represents the greatest single loss of institutional infrastructure in the more than 200 year history of the Catholic Church in Boston.
Public, legislative and media attention regarding this catastrophe has focused, rightly, on the now disgraced Steward founder and CEO Ralph de la Torre.
It was the Archbishop of Boston however, Cardinal Sean O’Malley, who originally appointed de la Torre, who welcomed him and praised him as President of Caritas Christi, who believed him when he said he would preserve the system’s Catholic identity, and who sold the hospital network to a private equity fund on de la Torre’s recommendation.
That equity firm, Cerberus Capital Management, promptly turned the system over to de la Torre’s Steward Health Care Company, which raped it and ran it into the ground.
Serious Catholics should feel outrage over this loss, over the complicity of the Archdiocese of Boston, and over the cowardly refusal of our spiritual leaders to offer any public accounting of how this appalling and unprecedented disaster was inflicted upon the Catholic community of Boston.
St. Elizabeth’s Medical Center, Brighton Massachusetts. Photo (cropped) by John Phelan, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
