Hospitals Revamp Chapels Into Meditation Rooms:
Today, hospital chapels vary widely. Some still reflect their founders' religious roots. Others have been renovated to accommodate multiple religions, or their religious symbols have been removed so the rooms resemble waiting rooms or art galleries."There was a diversity for a long time that was Christian diversity," said the Rev. George Handzo, vice president of pastoral care leadership and practice at HealthCare Chaplaincy, based in New York City.
Staff and patient populations at many U.S. hospitals are much more diverse than they once were, and hospitals know it makes good business sense to accommodate them, Handzo said. "They don't want to lose those people to the place down the street."
So, I'm just wondering how the mechanics go. Let's listen in on a hospital board meeting.
Director 1: "We need to revamp the chapel to accommodate non-Christian customers ... er, patients ... and their families. To whom shall we delegate this project?"
Director 2: "Um, is that really necessary? Are people complaining?"
Director 1: "Yes, we had a Muslim family here last week asking for a prayer rug. We couldn't provide it for them. That needs to change."
Director 2: "Uh, well, why does that need to change? I mean, most of our patients are not Muslims. And to be honest, a little Christianity might do them some good ..."
Director 1: "DR. JONES!!!! Do you realize what you are saying? We can't put ourselves in the position of telling patients that our religion ... I mean, Christianity ... 'might do them some good'! How is that not bigoted and discriminatory? This is the 21st century and we're a pluralistic, multicultural society!"
Director 2: "OK, OK, you're right. Maybe we could set up a Muslim prayer room, then? Somewhere in the east wing? We've got a few extra rooms on the third floor - "
Director 1: "And send the message that Muslims are second-class citizens? I don't think so! And what are we supposed to do, give the Buddhists and Hindus and Wiccans and atheists their own chapels? We don't have the resources for that. No, the only solution is to revamp the chapel we already have and make it inoffensive to all faith communities."
Dr. Jones, at this point, cannot defend his position without getting himself into lots of trouble, so the discussion ends and another hospital chapel falls to the desecrators. Which points us to our dilemma. We Americans who lament the de-Chrisitanization of our culture are effectively out of arguments. And we are out of arguments because the only arguments we know how to use (or indeed are permitted to use) - arguments that have worked in the past - have been based on false premises and are now being used against us. De-Christianization will continue apace until our basic assumptions about religion, culture and society are corrected.
Comments (11)
I'm going to raise a conjecture. I'm not saying I believe this to be true. I'm saying there is some inductive evidence for it: I _conjecture_ that some of these deChristianized hospital chapels will become distinctively Muslim. This has happened at at least one university (I believe it may be Georgetown, which would be amazing, but I don't have time to look it up right now and apologize to Georgetown if it isn't). The "interfaith prayer room" has become so Muslim that one student was actually stopped by a posse of Muslim males for saying the rosary in the room.
Nature abhors a vacuum. Where one group is wimpy and another group is aggressive, it doesn't take much to guess which one will take over.
Posted by Lydia | July 21, 2010 8:07 PM
Sorry, make that George Mason University. See here:
http://snappedshot.com/archives/893-GMU-Update-Prayer-Room-Expansion-Nixed.html
Posted by Lydia | July 21, 2010 8:20 PM
Spiritual care for the dying is optional and a matter of personal preference, it's the scientific expertise that counts.
Or so this kind of move assumes, anyway.
Related: The privacy regulations passed by HIPAA actually hinder chaplains from ministering to their flock. A few years ago my pastor announced that extra steps were necessary to make sure a chaplain could visit you.
For those of us Catholics who want last rites when we need them, this is another hurdle our bureaucracy puts up.
Posted by Kevin J Jones | July 21, 2010 9:16 PM
Lydia, the story I linked has this paragraph:
Your conjecture is not beyond the realm of possibility, not at all. The GMU story is Exhibit A.
Posted by Jeff Culbreath | July 21, 2010 9:51 PM
Unless one religion is as good as another, these diversity arguments are tripe. Ask one's interlocitor to prove that. It can neutralize the diversity argument. Chosing religions is not like choosing cell phones. Not every model will work and if it does, perhaps not very well. If there is no religion that is true (they all can't be) then why have a chapel at all? This is a problem in apologetics which most hospital adminitrators are ill-equipted to deal with.
The Chicken
Posted by The Masked Chicken | July 22, 2010 8:38 AM
Wow, Jeff, reality moves fast. What happened at GMU was that there were these Muslim things (such as prayer rugs and a divider between men's and women's sections), and the Muslim students were using the "meditation room" so often that they just left this stuff out all the time. Not to mention being there most of the time and intimidating and stopping Catholics, etc., wanting to pray. So the room came to have, de facto, a permanently Muslim "look" (with this big divider up and the prayer rugs out all the time), even though the original theory was that these items would be taken out and used only when needed and then put away. That still can be problematic in various ways--e.g., if one group is dominating the space all the time, or for large items like dividers of the whole room, which are a little hard to ignore if you happen to walk in while they're in use. But in the end, they are just out and there all the time.
But no stations of the cross, of course!
Posted by Lydia | July 22, 2010 12:04 PM
Because, Chicken, religion brings people comfort, and part of the function of a hospital is to bring suffering and grieving people comfort. It doesn't matter whether any particular religion is true or not: we have a chapel because religion in general is comforting.
How do you answer that one?
This presupposes that hospitals and their administrators have some obligation to uphold not only medical, scientific, and financial truth, but also religious truth. Which, of course, they do, but that argument hasn't been made in a long time, and under our "dictatorship of relativism" it's largely going to fail. For a while.
That said, I think more people need to be making this argument in hospital board rooms and related contexts, not because it is likely to win, but just to get people used to hearing the argument and to the idea that religious truth matters - or at least, that it matters to many of us who are not Muslims!
So the long-term strategy is to get society used to thinking about religious truth, that it matters not only in homes and churches, but also in the public square, in business, and in government. When we have enough critical mass in this department, then specific arguments for the truths of Christianity can be made effectively.
Posted by Jeff Culbreath | July 22, 2010 1:10 PM
As you said, nature abhors a vacuum. This is another great example of how our society's weak, docile, lukewarm, barely-there Christianity makes room for the aggressive lies and pathologies of Islam. If Christians were using the chapel as they should, if all seven of the canonical hours were recited, if there were rosaries and chaplets and novenas and benedictions, if the blessed Sacrament were reserved for perpetual adoration, if priests and monks and nuns were seen regularly, etc., in other words, if Catholics and other Christians were living public lives of faith and prayer, there would be no perceived "space" for Mohammedans to encroach upon.
Posted by Jeff Culbreath | July 22, 2010 1:29 PM
The same principle goes for society at large. Because American Christians long ago opted for a secular, "non-religious" public square - tipping their hat to pluralism, thinking they were doing their Christian neighbors of other denominations a favor - the vacuum is filled by non-Christians and anti-Christians with few (if any) scruples about neighborliness.
Posted by Jeff Culbreath | July 22, 2010 1:43 PM
The Chapel at the Catholic hospital I used to work for will be the non-people thing I miss the most. Even though I am not Catholic, the Chapel most certainly was.
I am applying at an Adventist hospital that is currently managed by a Catholic company -- I wonder what their chapel looks like?
Kamilla
Posted by Kamilla | July 22, 2010 3:10 PM
Lydia, your conversation between directors presumes that either the hospital itself is secular, or is founded in such a loosely religious way that a connection with religious truth is irrelevant to its leadership. But lots and lots of hospitals are specifically Catholic or specifically Adventist or whatever. A person shouldn't be invited to be on the board if they can't tell the difference between sensitivity to pluralist customer base and disparaging religious truth altogether. What gets me is how such boards come to not only have such members, but to be wholly dominated by such members in the face of a specifically denominational founding.
Posted by Tony | July 22, 2010 8:58 PM