Correspondence
POLICANO, JOSEPH D. & GALLIGAN, ANDREW A. & DUFFY, BENEDICT J. & CALDWELL, LAURA RYAN & ANDERSEN, CAROL DELLMANN & Clifford, Nicholas R. & O'Brien, Dennis
Health care is a right Your HMO consultant on medical care, Christopher Koller, states that "access to health care should be a fundamental right for U.S.citizens" [December 1,1995]. Just so. But...
...Was it permissible to believe, in 1910 for example, that it was wrong to exclude religions other than Catholicism from a state...
...Insurance companies and HMOs are understandably opposed to a single-payer system...
...Roma locuta...
...Apart from a recent piece in Newsweek, this problem rarely receives attention...
...Another is that the heavy-handed use of teaching authority and the attempt to bind future generations can be disastrous...
...One point of this history lesson is, of course, that the church teaches cheerfully in the twentieth century what it condemned in the nineteenth (to say nothing of the thirteenth-read Boniface VIII's Unam sanctam, for instance...
...Problems of HMOs Working as a health professional in an inner-city primary-care office serving families, it seems to me that Christopher F. Koller, who works for a health maintenance organization, pays little attention to some of the problems I see in my practice...
...We have no (Continued on page 4) (Continued from page 2) power, we are free at last...
...Causa finita...
...Is one expected to believe both Pius IX and John XXIII, and, if so, how is this extraordinary act of sinister dexterity to be accomplished...
...On infallibility: I am convinced that Vatican I et sequentia got it fundamentally wrong...
...Would Commonweal readers attempt such a trip in January holding a small child in each hand and waiting for daytime buses running once an hour or so...
...X, Mrs...
...No waffling here: Unlike leaders of other patriarchal Christian churches, the Catholic authorities have put their cards on the table...
...often we find that the specialist they can see on their plan is located more than an hour's bus ride away and involves two or three transfers...
...He does mention HMO-related complaints about reduction of choice among providers and difficulty in obtaining approval for referrals, but negates these charges on the ground that they are "often driven by anecdotal evidence...
...But that isn't the case at this time, and it is just this sort of ethical question that drives an increasing number of United States physicians to join Physicians for a National Health Program...
...Y is healthy but needs a mammogram, and Child Z needs to be hospitalized for severe asthma...
...As more of them are moved to HMOs, the question of finding conveniently located specialists looms large...
...From the way you speak down to the pope and treat him like a child caught in some awful misconduct, you make me think that the keys of the kingdom were given to Commonweal and not to Peter and his successors...
...Avery Dulles, S.J.: Serious doubts by a significant group of committed Catholics that a papal statement is really infallible "could be interpreted as a sign that the pope had perhaps exceeded his competence and that some necessary condition for an infallible act had not been fulfilled" (Teaching Authority and Infallibility in the Church: Lutherans and Catholics in Dialogue, Augsburg, 1978...
...With almost 30 percent of every health-care dollar now spent making insurance companies rich, it's time to take a new look at our real health-care needs with a view to making quality health care accessible at reasonable cost to all Americans...
...Yves Congar maintained that only the church as a whole, including both laity and hierarchy, constitute an adequate subject for receiving revelation (see, William Henn, "Yves Congar, O.P.," America, August 12,1995...
...LAURA RYAN CALDWELL, R.N., B.S.N...
...Francis A. Sullivan, S.J.: "Subsequent reception [by the church] does not confer infallibility on the act of the magisterium, but it provides infallible confirmation that an infallible definition has taken place" (Magisterium, Paulist Press, 1983...
...In fact it was covered, but by ordering it, Dr...
...Infallible...
...Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio Well said "Responsum dubium" [December 1, 1995] is superb-wonderful, eloquent, memorable...
...The community has said that we cannot be part of the power structure, that we are not allowed to practice birth control, and are fated to fulfill our role as nurturers...
...Talking down to the pope When I read your editorial, "Responsum dubium," what came to mind was the September '95 editorial in the New Oxford Review titled "Down the Old Schism Trail...
...Only men are worthy to celebrate the Eucharist and make decisions...
...But I often see new patients, such as a sixty-three-year-old woman last week, who told me she had never had a mammogram "because my doctor told me it wasn't covered by insurance...
...I work with ethical and caring physicians who would never hesitate to refer for such needs...
...As women, then, we are like Jesus and his followers: We are not accepted by the Temple authorities...
...Somewhat more than a century later than the Syllabus, John XXIII wrote in Pacem in terris: "Every human being has the right to honor God according to the dictates of an upright conscience, and therefore the right to profess his religion in private and public...
...But it will happen...
...Suppose Mr...
...Does a twentieth-century pope trump a nineteenth-century pope...
...Those Roman fellas are doing bad things...
...What we really need to reform is health insurance...
...Hingham, Mass...
...We are now official outsiders...
...Mental gymnastics How, precisely, are we to deal with the Vatican's latest pronouncement on the ordination of women...
...To put it in simple terms: If our family practice receives $132 a year each to care for Mr...
...From the whole tone of your piece, it's not some unidentified Americans but you yourselves who have a "readiness to treat his [the pope's] teaching office as purely advisory...
...According to the New Catholic Encyclopedia (1967), "the Syllabus must be accepted by all Catholics since it comes from the pope as universal teacher and judge....Its contents cannot be challenged by Catholics, and they are to give assent to it, holding the opposite of the condemned propositions...
...The Vatican I theologians were in a Cartesian spell, within which the only "truth" is some propositional statement-but that has to be wrong for a church...
...Most, in fact, would probably agree that its publication contributed heavily to the lamentable estrangement between the church and society that so characterized the late nineteenth century-and indeed part of the twentieth as well-to the considerable detriment of both...
...Does a council trump both...
...This gives us tremendous freedom to follow our own spirituality...
...dennis o'brien Middlebury, Vt...
...For whatever one believes about such ordination, it seems to me extraordinary that it should be neither a pope nor a coun-(Continued on page 29...
...The severe tone is most proper, and the repeated hope that the authorities shared the agony is manifestly effective...
...george p. morin Jefferson City, Tenn...
...Back in 1854, in his Syllabus of Errors, Pius IX condemned the proposition that "in the present day it is no longer expedient that the Catholic religion shall be held as the only religion of the state, to the exclusion of all other modes of worship," and made it clear that freedom of worship and ideas "corrupt the morals and minds of the people and [contribute to] the propagation of the pest of indifference...
...who today would champion all of Piux IX's Syllabus...
...Many have small children, few have cars...
...A liberating edict According to the Word of God, as interpreted by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, women cannot be priests...
...A would have made a little less money that year...
...He does not mention the glaring conflict of interest involved in capitated plans (where primary-care physicians agree to provide services to a defined population for a per-person annual fee...
...A majority of our patients are on welfare and receive Medicaid...
...Was it permissible in 1975 to believe that excluding such religions was right...
...BENEDICT J. DUFFY, M.D...
...It may be helpful to your readers to recall previous statements by five authorities dealing with the criteria for infallibility...
...What is the orthodox Catholic to do...
...Roller's article talks of reforming health care...
...For all the reasons given in your editorial of December 1,1 believe that the latest ruling on the ordination of women will do the same...
...A few years later the Second Vatican Council's Declaration on Religious Liberty stated that "It is an injustice done to the human person and to the order laid down for men by God, if a man is denied the free exercise of religion in society: saving a just public order...
...X needs to see a cardiologist, Mrs...
...Joseph Ratzinger (in 1969): "When there is neither consensus on the part of the universal church nor clear testimony in the sources, no binding decision is possible...
...Check it out Your comments on the "responsum" issued by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith on women's ordination strike me as being measured, thoughtful, respectful, and truthful...
...Bishop B.C...
...Y, and Child Z, there is a strong incentive to keep them well but there is also a strong incentive not to refer them to specialists or to other services because the costs will come out of the physicians' financial pot for the year...
...CAROL DELLMANN ANDERSEN Silver Lake, Ind...
...If such a decision were formally made, it would lack the necessary conditions and the question of the decision's legitimacy would have to be examined" (The Limits of the Papacy, by Patrick Granfield, Crossroad, 1990, citing Das Neue Volk Gottes, Patmos, 1969...
...Trust me...
...ANDREW A. GALLIGAN Tracy, Calif...
...I think it may be the best piece of rhetoric yet from the editors...
...Butler: "If a [papal] definition failed in the end to enjoy such a 'reception' on the part of the church, this would prove that the definition had not in fact met the stringent requirements for an ex cathedra pronouncement" (London Tablet, 225 [1971] and 231 [1977...
...I think the only answer is single-payer national health insurance based on the Canadian model but with modifications to fit the United States...
Vol. 123 • January 1996 • No. 1
