Another Vatican ‘reform’ cast in doubt

By Phil Lawler ( bio - articles - email ) | Jul 05, 2017

The timing isn’t perfect, unfortunately, for the Vatican’s offer of free treatment for Charlie Gard at Bambino Gesu Hospital—just after an AP investigative report uncovered serious problems with medical care at the Vatican-run institution. But there is solace in the news that the Vatican now recognizes that the hospital needed administrative reforms.

The first response to the AP story—an insistence that the complaints uncovered in a 2014 investigation were entirely unjustified, coupled with a threat to sue AP for publicizing them—was not terribly reassuring. Haven’t we seen this pattern from Church leaders in the past, in response to other sorts of complaints?

1. Your complaints are entirely false. It never happened.
2. If you make those charges public, we’ll sue.
3. Anyway we’ve taken steps to make sure it never happens again.

There’s another irony in the news that when the first Vatican investigation in 2014 reported grave problems with medical care, a follow-up investigation led by Sister Carol Keehan determined that actually everything was fine and Bambino Gesu was an exemplary institution. This was not the first time that Sister Keehan gave rave reviews to a medical program that other analysts had deemed disastrous. As you may recall, she was the leading Catholic cheerleader for Obamacare.