It’s been a pattern under Joe Biden’s time in executive office. As much as he has prefaced his political career in the media on his deeply held faith as a Catholic, time and again it is his administrations, as vice president and now as president, that have targeted American Catholic organizations with burdensome and often ridiculous regulatory challenges. The Little Sisters of the Poor met the ire of the Obama administration. Now Biden’s Department of Health and Human Services is demanding that the largest hospital system in Oklahoma, Saint Francis Health System, literally snuff out the flame of their belief to keep their doors open.
St. Francis, a nonprofit hospital system which opened in 1960 and now serves 400,000 Oklahomans every year, has chapels, you see. And in such chapels they have a small gas-lit candle, ensconced in glass, which symbolizes the eternal flame of faith. This presents a problem for the bureaucrats at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), who despite never having a problem with this expression of faith before, now deem it a fire hazard that must be removed for the hospital system to continue to receive its funding.
According to attorney Lori Windham, representative of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, a nonprofit organization, she is “not aware of any other case like this” in the history of the widespread Catholic hospital systems that serve Americans across the country. That a CMS outside accreditor would state a flame like this, well-removed from any at-risk situation, amounts to a safety violation would force the hospital to refuse Medicare, Medicaid, and CHIP patients.
“Is the Department of Health and Human Services now the arbitrator of Catholic doctrine?” Windham asks. And that is exactly what they are setting themselves up to be. While parties are now having discussions to attempt to work out an arrangement, St. Francis is resolved not to remove the flame. And once the denial came down, the standard thirty-day clock started ticking to comply or be shut down.
Becket has fired back at CMS and anticipates they will have to go to federal court under emergency procedures if the situation is not resolved. The CMS crackdown came despite the fact that the hospital has similar flames in the kitchen for pilot lights, and for gas dryers for hospital linens. “This is not Mrs. O’Leary’s barn,” says Windham. No — it’s just another example of a crackdown on expressions of faith under Joe Biden, an “On Eagle’s Wings” Catholic who has little interest in the actual application of faith.
