The following is a Catholic Action League of Massachusetts news release…
What remains of Catholic healthcare is about to end in historically Catholic Massachusetts — one of only three American states where Catholics once comprised a majority of the population.
Mercy Medical Center in Springfield, the Bay State’s last acute care Catholic hospital, is to be sold.
Owned by Trinity Health of New England and administered — since 1874 — by the Sisters of Providence, the hospital is to be acquired by Baystate Health, a secular healthcare system which performs abortions, sterilizations and gender surgeries, distributes birth control pills, implants both hormonal and barrier contraceptives, and administers the abortifacient morning after pill.
The transfer to the new ownership, supported by Governor Maura Healey, Congressman Richard Neal, and Springfield Mayor Domenic Sarno, is scheduled for November 1, 2026.
Although Trinity Health claims that “Baystate Health will preserve Mercy’s nonprofit mission, community commitment and legacy of high quality care,” there was no mention of the hospital’s Catholic identity or its continued compliance with the Church’s Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services.
This news comes less than two years after the catastrophic loss of the six former Caritas Christi Hospitals, when the Steward Healthcare Company — which had retained the system’s Catholic identity — went bankrupt.
The Catholic Action League called the proposed sale “another tragic loss of the institutional patrimony of American Catholicism, carefully built up over two centuries by our immigrant ancestors, only to be improvidently forfeited by a dysfunctional post-conciliar Church.”
Catholic Action League Executive Director C. J. Doyle made the following comments:
With the sale and presumed secularization of Mercy Hospital, there will no longer be a single acute care hospital in the Commonwealth where Catholic medical ethics are practiced, where the sanctity of human life is protected from conception to natural death, where the pastoral care of Catholic patients is guaranteed, and where the conscience rights of Catholic doctors, nurses and health care workers will be fully respected and preserved as an institutional norm.
Proponents of Vatican II said it would bring a new springtime to the Church. For Catholic healthcare in Massachusetts, it looks more like a hard, Valley Forge winter.
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Mercy Hospital, Springfield, Mass., between ca. 1930 and ca. 1945, Boston Public Library Tichnor Brothers collection. Published by The Springfield News Company Tichnor Bros. Inc., Boston, Mass. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
