Gulf Pine Catholic

8 Gulf Pine Catholic • November 8, 2024 228-539-9800 www.RiemannFamily.com Gulfport Pass Christian West Jackson County Biloxi Long Beach Hancock County November 4 is the Feast of Saint Charles Borro- meo, a leader of the Counter-Reformation who served as Archbishop of Milan from 1564 to 1584. From a wealthy and influential family, Borromeo spurned worldly power at every turn, choosing instead to walk in the footsteps of Christ and to call others to do the same. He dedicated his life to the Church at the age of 12, and it was around this time that he assumed finan- cial control over the prosperous Benedictine Abbey of Sts. Gratinian and Felin. He refused to utilize any rev- enue from the abbey to enrich his family or for secular purposes, instead giving to the poor all excess funds not needed for his education. When his uncle, Cardinal Giovanni Angelo Medi- ci, became Pope Pius IV, Borromeo was summoned to Rome and made a cardinal at just 21 years old. He emerged as the new pope’s closest advisor during a time when such familial ties were relied upon to ensure loy- alty. Unlike many from such powerful families, Bor- romeo continued to renounce worldly things, focusing instead on reforming the Church. He played an import- ant role in the Council of Trent, which helped return the faithful to a focus on humility and the call to repentance at the heart of Christ’s message. Upon being made Archbishop of Milan, Borromeo immersed himself in an effort to revive the faith of the city’s peo- ple. When Milan was hit by famine and a plague in the same year, he turned everyone’s attention to God in prayer, at one point walking barefoot in a procession, inspiring those who were suffering to unite themselves with Christ on the cross; and he put prayer into action by marshaling all resources at his disposal to feed tens of thousands of suffering people. Cardinal Borromeo once told the priests of his arch- diocese, “If a tiny spark of God’s love already burns within you, do not expose it to the wind, for it may get blown out. Keep the stove tightly shut so that it will not lose its heat and grow cold. In other words, avoid distractions as well as you can. Stay quiet with God.” This bit of advice contains words of wisdom that apply in any era, but that spoke in a particular way to challenges of his time. They also speak poignantly to the challenges of distraction we face today. In Cardi- nal Borromeo’s time, those distractions came from the flourishing of society that took place during the Renais- sance, resulting in certain excesses that he identified as distractions from the message of Christ. In our own time, we might easily identify technology as our prima- ry distraction, but distractions come in all forms. The key is to be on guard so the things we train our attention on do not distance us from what is most important. By putting the Gospel message into action, Saint Charles Borromeo showed how to move beyond dis- traction to a focus on loving God and neighbor. During a time when iconoclasm was taking hold among the followers of Luther and Calvin, Borromeo set about to reform the excesses of art and adornment to train the minds of the faithful on Christ, inspiring a measured reform rather than outright destruction. And here Borromeo gives us a powerful example, because we are called as Catholics to constantly be pruning the Church from within as we strive together towards God, never abandoning each other, and always seeking to work in unity as one family in Christ. Fr. Ed Dougherty, M.M., serves on The Chris- tophers’ Board of Directors. For a free copy of the Christopher News Note, GOOD SPORTSMANSHIP, write: The Christophers, 5 Hanover Square, New York, NY 10004; or e-mail: mail@christophers.org . Humble saint used power for good Light One Candle Fr. Dougherty In October of 2024, a group known as “Do No Harm” released the Stop the Harm Database ( STHD ), a searchable internet resource that compre- hensively catalogs sex change treatments performed between 2019-2023 on minors in healthcare facili- ties throughout the United States. Do No Harm profiled children’s hospitals and ex- amined their advertised services to determine which medical interventions they provide. They also ana- lyzed insurance claims data to determine which sex change procedures each healthcare facility had ad- ministered to minors. The data come from medical billing codes, which are submitted to insurance com- panies to claim payment. The public release of the database revealed that a number of Catholic health care facilities have been involved in “gender reassignment” practices. Ac- cording to the findings, Providence Health & Ser- vices , which owns 51 hospitals across seven western states, is the Catholic health system that performed the largest number of transgender interventions on children, carrying out a total of 81 transgender sur- geries, and prescribing hormones or puberty block- ers to 113 children. The National Catholic Bioethics Center , which has years of experience in working with the same types of medical billing codes, has an- alyzed the STHD report and issued a statement on its homepage (ncbcenter.org) addressing the report and its findings. The best interpretation of authoritative Catholic teaching and moral principles is that a person should not cause damage to his or her healthy body (via surgery or hormones) based on a mistaken and subjective impres- sion that he or she was “born in the wrong body.” The corollary would be that Catholic health care institutions should not perform or cooperate with any gender-tran- sitioning surgical procedures, nor provide puberty-blocking or cross-sex hormones for gender transitions. The fact that some Catholic hospitals are involved in sex reas- signment procedures reminds us of the need for con- tinued vigilance on the part of diocesan bishops and Catholic health care leaders when it comes to Catholic health care facilities within their purview. There may also be a need for more thoroughgoing ethical formation for employ- ees and administrators to assist them in coun- tering the pro-transgen- der ideological mes- saging that has recently become commonplace. When a Catholic hospital appears in a database as having offered hormones or carried out gender reassignment surgeries, it should be noted that this may not be indicative of current policy or practice. Some Catholic hospitals, for example, have had pediatric endocrinologists on staff who had pre- scribed puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones, but when the fact was discovered, and meetings were ar- ranged to review and discuss the situation, the prac- tice came to a stop. The cessation of such practices would not typically be indicated in such databases. SEE MAKING SENSE OF BIOETHICS, PAGE 12 Making Sense of Bioethics Fr. Pacholczyk Catholic hospitals and “Gender reassignment” for minors?