Oregon diocese severs ties with hospital

GRANTS PASS, Ore. — The Catholic Church is ending its long-standing relationship with St. Charles Medical Center in Bend over a surgical birth-control technique.

Diocese of Baker Bishop Robert Vasa said Tuesday the church can no longer sponsor the hospital because it continues to offer tubal ligation, which leaves women unable to get pregnant and is specifically prohibited by church teachings.

"Pregnancy itself is not a disease, even though in our culture we treat pregnancy as a disease," Vasa said. "So this prevents the function of a properly functioning organ under the guise of health care.

"It would be misleading for me to allow St. Charles Bend to be acknowledged as Catholic in name while I am certain that some important tenets of the Ethical and Religious Directives are no longer being observed."

Catholic Mass will no longer be celebrated in the hospital chapel, and church property not needed by the hospital will be returned, Vasa said.

The name of the hospital remains St. Charles, and the decision does not apply to affiliated facilities in Redmond and Prineville, which never were tied to the church, Vasa added.

The hospital does about 235 tubal ligations a year, and Vasa and the hospital had been in negotiations over the issue for a few years. The parties finally decided that neither could bend from their positions.

"We just felt we have been offering these procedures for decades, and we have an obligation to the patients in our community to offer the procedures they need," said James Diegel, president and CEO of Cascade Healthcare, the hospital's parent company. "This should have no impact on our operations or finances or anything. It's just a severing of an historical relationship that has been in place for 90-plus years."

The hospital was founded in 1918 by the Sisters of St. Joseph of Tipton, Ind., and the order's last administrator retired in 1988, serving on the board until 2000.

The hospital was taken over by a local nonprofit organization in the 1970s.

The hospital would continue to look to church directives for guidance, Diegel added.

"This doesn't change who we have been, who we are and who we will continue to be going forward," Diegel said.