A Catholic Perspective in Health Care

I've just read an excellent homily/article on Health Care from a Catholic perspective, and thought I would share it. With a h/t to Crossed the Tiber and Mary's Anawim here is a concluding quote:

Think about this: what area of human life involves more moral decision making than the human body and it’s health? In the end, beyond the questions of whether or not the bill passed by Congress will provide taxpayer support of abortion or euthanasia, we have to ask ourselves a much more profound question.

That is, are we turning over all the vast numbers of moral questions and decisions involved in health care to a government that will make the right moral decisions for us? Can we entrust our health care, and our family’s health care to a government presently dominated by people who don’t understand the dignity of life from conception until death, or that it’s wrong to experiment on embryonic human beings, or to clone human beings? or even the very meaning of the words “family” and “marriage”?

And even if all 537 elected federal officials were 100% pro-life and pro-marriage, subsidiarity forces us to pause and remember the huge government bureaucracy, full of lots of unelected people. With all due respect for the many good and hard working federal employees, a lot of federal employees have many strange ideas about morality that are very different from Christ’s.

Today we remember Christ’s power and desire to heal and care for the sick, and the serious responsibility that places on us as Christians. We cannot lightly shift this responsibility to others —whether they are our neighbor, or an insurance company or a government official. Let us pray that God will guide our nation in the debate over health care reform. And let us pray that all Catholics may be led by the wisdom of Christ, so wonderfully laid before us in the richness and fullness of the social doctrines of His Holy Catholic Church.

You can read the whole homily here.