Seton Hall and its proposed "Catholic" medical school--something for the new archbishop to digest

Can a Catholic medical school be founded with a secular teaching hospital as its partner?

This is the issue that Seton Hall University of the Archdiocese of Newark is finding. The ethicists at National Catholic Bioethics Center (NCBC) via correspondence with the university vice-president Larry Robinson think it will be alright because the Ethical and Religious Directives will still be maintained by the students.

But in the absence of medical doctor input, seriously, how can medical students be truly formed to be Catholic physicians in a non-Catholic setting?

This is whom I find among my peers who graduated from a Catholic medical school but trained in secular hospitals. They were the ones who voted in for Hillary, yet saying they are pro-life, who have had children out of wedlock or stayed in cohabitation. They give abortion as just as they give another option when a mother comes in with a pregnancy.

It seems that the Catholic medical school gave them the pride, and the non-Catholic/secular hospital gave them the formation. Meaning, they end as value-less as Catholic physicians. They might as well just say they graduated from the regular university.

Other Catholic faithful are aghast at this for it is obvious, wanting to call in the Vatican to intervene, hence this article. Note especially Seton Hall is making a “Catholic” medical school but having a secular hospital as its teaching hospital. It is not just any secular hospital. It is Hackensack Hospital, among the largest abortion providers in the state and close partners with Mount Sinai of New York known for among other things the pioneering twin-reduction technique in recent times. The latter hospital is the leading edge of anti-life geriatricians who promote the assisted suicide/euthanasia agenda and gender inclusivity initiatives with their same-sex bathrooms and politically correct language so its New Jersey counterpart cannot be far behind.

Physicians who are deeply Catholic had they been thoroughly involved in this process, will speak on how professionalism is informed especially from its beginning stages. To make a medical school and call it Catholic by its affiliation with Seton Hall and the Archdiocese, then partnering with a teaching hospital that will just exemplify all the values that goes against what they supposedly stand for is a joke, a travesty. It cannot truly be possible to form Catholic doctors in an environment that will be against, as proven by their revenues on abortion and contraception and sheer numbers (only 2 of the 90 OB Gynes are prolife, say Dr. Michael Guiliani of Hackensack).

Pres. Gabriel Esteban reasons that they cannot do anything if the student chooses the anti-life stance or that “there really are other issues than abortion” (this despite Philadelphia Archbishop Chaput’s recent announcement that it should be a top issue). He even does not rule out that the adjacent acreage of the building site will have Planned Parenthood. down the line for it is not under their control. That is not speaking with knowledge and conviction on the fulfillment of the Catholic mission of the school, is it?

Initially cheering on the concept of a medical school, I now fear the creation of a medical school monster that will be so unworthy of the Catholic name, with a teaching hospital so fully cooperative of anti-life agenda and so driven are the planners for this, that it ceases to have a holy perspective and process (all dissenters are banned).

What they have achieved, if it is created, are lawsuits from a fraud perspective, for it cannot and will not be able to accomplish what it seeks. It then becomes a liability—a failure of their Catholic mission. They had a chance to make it right, but in this ill-planned, profit-driven partnership, public and private funds being put towards it will be in vain.

Their pride of having a white paper to be the enforcer and deliverer of a Catholic culture is the very marker itself on a lack of knowledge on the medical culture. The Hippocratic Oath is becoming trampled on, amended over time to be open to sex with patients, abortion and now euthanasia. Why would they pay notice to a non-penalty connected memo?

In a matter of years, when the innocent medical students will be seeing the secular unreason in the clinics, they will be confused, angry and possibly even have a higher frequency of what is already known to exist in the medical school phase: burn-out, depression and suicide. It will be a self-fulfilling prophecy of the medical school when they chose the lukewarm path that may even have failed Aquinas’s standards of a moral act.

The officials in the Archdiocese and the University seem to be keen to have the glamour of a medical school cachet at all cost, therefore a highly compromised even dubious “Catholic” medical school. So why even bother? If it has no place nor Catholic teaching hospital capacity to form doctors as they should be—shining beacons of the Gospel and the Truth—the administration should really first get the necessary half of this equation in order.