Faith-based care embodies religious commitment

The Sisters of St. Martha’s decision to end their affiliation with an Antigonish, Nova Scotia hospital deserves respect. They have carried a demanding responsibility for generations. However, their decision provides little justification for demanding that every Catholic, or every religious, healthcare institution in Canada surrender its mission or lose public support, particularly when our healthcare systems are already struggling.

In the wake of their decision, Globe and Mail health columnist André Picard’s call to secularize Catholic hospitals raises legitimate concerns about patients navigating a complicated system. People facing serious illness should know what care is available and receive help accessing it. His proposed remedy, secularizing Catholic hospitals, would remove something Canadians continue to need.

In February, Cardus convened a symposium on the future of faith in healthcare, bringing together Catholic and Protestant healthcare leaders as well as those with experience in Jewish and secular care settings.

Advertisement

For these practitioners, faith informs how they understand the person in front of them. The Judeo-Christian conviction that every person bears the image of God gives human dignity a foundation that survives declining health and increasing dependence. A patient’s worth remains intact when treatment fails, or when providing care requires more time than a strained system can readily offer.

Certainly, compassionate care is found throughout healthcare. Faith-based institutions provide a home for their particular understanding of human dignity through both their governance and daily work, and that conviction carries practical consequences. 

Symposium participants described caring for people whose needs fall through gaps in existing services. Journey Home Hospice, a program of the Saint Elizabeth Foundation, provides care at no cost for people experiencing homelessness at the end of life, including spiritual care and grief support.

Faith also sustains caregivers through exhausting work and connects institutions with communities willing to volunteer and accompany people through illness. These contributions benefit Canadians of all religious affiliations, including the non-religious.

In his column, Picard endorses kosher and halal meals, spiritual support, and religious rituals, recognizing that beliefs matter to healing. Yet he curiously leaves those beliefs little room to shape the institutions through which religious communities care for their neighbours.

Advertisement

For many believers, faith informs their responsibilities toward someone who is suffering. Accommodating religious meals while requiring a religious hospital to participate in ending life draws the boundary of acceptable faith at a point convenient to secular opinion. It discounts the convictions that brought religious communities into healthcare and sustain their service. Accommodating a patient’s practices and respecting an institution’s mission involve different responsibilities. We should work through those responsibilities with patients’ needs firmly in view.

Picard’s assertion that institutions have no conscience sidesteps how they function. Hospitals adopt ethical commitments and ask staff to uphold a shared mission. These commitments arise from people organizing themselves to serve a public purpose. Religious communities’ collective work deserves consideration when deciding what diversity our healthcare system can accommodate.

Public funding brings obligations to provide competent care and account for public money. Religious Canadians contribute to that funding. Requiring every publicly funded hospital to administer procedures such as Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) that violate its religious commitments would leave Canadians who share those beliefs without institutions reflecting their understanding of care.

MAiD access should also be discussed with some sense of scale. From legalization in 2016 through today, over 100,000 Canadians received MAiD through our existing healthcare systems. MAiD remains widely available and accessible in a healthcare system that includes religious institutions.

Those figures cannot settle every concern about a transfer or delay. Such experiences, across all medical procedures, deserve attention. Health authorities and faith-based providers should establish clear information and workable arrangements for patients seeking services an institution does not offer, while communities with a single hospital require careful planning. 

But these cases leave advocates of compulsory secularization such as Picard with a question to answer: why does providing widespread access require every institution to participate?

Advertisement

As Canada confronts an aging population and growing care needs, religious communities should be able to continue contributing to institutions where their convictions guide their service and Canadians of every faith, and of none, receive care.

(Ray Pennings is the executive vice-president and co-founder of the Canadian think tank Cardus.)

A version of this article appeared in the October 18, 2026 issue of The Catholic Register with the headline "Faith-based care embodies religious commitment".