St Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center in Arizona was a Catholic-affiliated institution, and the Roman Catholic Diocese of Phoenix has just made a major strategic error: they have stripped the hospital of its affiliation.

There are two reasons this was a bad idea for the church. One is that it exposes them as callous, evil bastards who don’t care for their patients as much as they do their invisible, nonexistent souls. The reason the church took this action is that doctors there performed an emergency abortion on a woman who was 11 weeks pregnant and dying. The choice was to stand by and do nothing while watching the mother and fetus die, or abort and treat woman and let her live. The Catholic Church believes the doctors should have taken no action and allowed her to die.

The second big mistake is that the fraud of the Catholic hospital charade stands exposed. This was an incredibly revealing statement:

St. Joseph’s does not receive direct funding from the church, but in addition to losing its Catholic endorsement, the 697-bed hospital will no longer be able to celebrate Mass and must remove the Blessed Sacrament from its chapel.

In other words, the Catholic church has benefited from the association with an actual house of healing, while providing nothing but magic crackers and the recommendation of local priests.

No loss. If that’s all the saint’s name tagged onto a hospital provides, they’re all better off leaving that nonsense behind.