Truth be told?

I had a boss once who always told me he didn’t want any “spin” on his messages. “If I tell the truth, I don’t have to remember what I said,” he explained. His honesty served both him and the organization he served well.

It appears that Catholic News Agency would benefit from a similar strategy. To put it plain and simple, the quotes they attribute to Cardinal Francis George in their story (also posted on EWTN) are just wrong. I was in the room, as a member of the USCCB staff, for the presentation. And the official audio file that recorded the session for USCCB archives confirms my memory.

While the cardinal did present a sequence of events to the bishops, he never used the phrase “so-called Catholic,” accused the Catholic Health Association of creating a “parallel magisterium” or said the meeting of the three bishops with Sr. Keehan had “frustrating results.” And that’s just three examples. Not to mention that the reporting of the events is just plain wrong: for an example, the Stupak Amendment was not defeated in the Senate in December 2009, as the article states.

The one hour session was executive, without media present, because Cardinal George felt it was important to report personally to the bishops how he and the three committee chairmen directed the staff to represent the Conference's position with both the CHA and the Congress in the final days of the debate on healthcare reform. He asked the bishops to provide honest appraisal of those efforts.

To honor the bishops’ privacy and confidentiality, we will not be releasing the transcript. It’s unfortunate if someone breached that confidentiality; also unfortunate if CNA tried to take an educated guess at what the cardinal might have said and cobbled together its own fabrication of the session.

For CNN to elaborate even more on what CNA said in error is even more disturbing. If CNN had tried to verify the citations, it would have learned that CNA fabricated quotes. It also would not have made its huge and erroneous assumption that the issue in question was an example of the bishops at odds with the sisters.

There’s certainly plenty of disagreement between the bishops and the Catholic health care organizations regarding the implications of the health care legislation. But to confuse the situation with quotes that aren’t true is just plain dishonest.

Unprecedented Dialogue Bears Very Specific Fruit

I recently had the unique experience of sitting in on a conference call in person, as the USCCB's Department of Justice, Peace and Human Development facilitated the announcement of some "guidance and options" that emerged as a document, Respecting the Just Rights of Workers: Guidance and Options for Catholic Health Care and Unions, from the unprecedented dialogue between the U.S. bishops, Catholic health care and labor leaders. Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, Archbishop Emeritus of Washington, moderated both the dialogue and the phone conference.

America Magazine has already blogged on the session, capturing quite a bit of its content and flavor.

The aim of the "guidance and options" dialogue and document was to create a fair process for Catholic health care workers to decide whether or not to form a union. This involved a long process of getting Catholic bishops, Catholic health care leaders and labor leaders to find common ground informed by Catholic social teaching.

Ultimately, the document proffers seven key principles of appropriate conduct between employers and union representatives:

-- demonstrate respect for each other’s organization and mission
-- provide workers with equal access to information from both sides
-- adhere to standards for truthfulness and balance in their communications
-- create a pressure-free environment
-- allow workers to vote through a fair and expeditious process
-- honor employees’ decision regardless of the outcome
-- create a system for enforcing these principles during the course of an organizing drive

That last point about enforcement raised a question from a reporter if these measures were going to be enforced by the dialogue panel that produced them. It was quickly noted that the document's "guidance and options" were just that and therefore non-binding. The point of non-binding seemed to elicit a tone of "well then, what's the point?" in the reporter's voice.

The points, it turned out, were several. First, Cardinal McCarrick pointed out, the document wasn't binding because the panel was not in authority to bind (trust a man who's participated in a conclave to know a little something about conferring the power to bind). That is, none of the organizations involved owed any sort of allegiance to the dialogue panel. But, it was then raised, those very organizations and institutions had come forward years ago and asked that a document of this sort be created. So, now that it's been made a reality, why would they not want to adopt its principles?

I believe it was Sister Carol Keehan of the Catholic Hospital Association who raised the point that these principles, though non-binding, reflect solid Catholic social teaching and would be in the best interest of any organization to implement.

So, while the unionization of Catholic health care workers may be a little on the esoteric side for some of us, this is still a happy instance of dialogue and working toward common ground bearing fruit for the benefit of all involved.