The last basic chunk of information is that Resurrection Health Care is -- in the way it views itself and in the way it is seen by the community and the law -- a "Catholic" health care provider. I admit, I had little idea what baggage that carried about week ago. But from a little digging, it seems like caring for sick bodies as an extension of religious ministry is part of the fiber of the American Catholic Church. Witness, for example, how Resurrection HC describes its mission:

Resurrection Health Care exists to witness God's sustaining love through compassionate, family-centered care. Motivated by a reverence for life and respect for those we serve, we are committed to improving the health and well-being of our community. We promote a climate that empowers all of us to effectively steward our human and financial resources.

And that same idea is everywhere you look as you jump into this nexus between Catholicism and health care. Case in point, see how the Catholic Health Association details what they call their "commitments", including their "moral obligation to provide quality health care in respect for the human dignity of each person we serve. The takeaway? That caring for the sick is engrained in America's Catholic institutional web made up of the archdioceses, parishes, schools, not-for-profits like RHC, and so on. And that approach has earned them plenty of good vibes. Catholic hospitals provide good care for all and especially the poor, the thinking has long gone.

How this story has played out in Chicago brings us back to Resurrection. About ten years ago, Cardinal Bernadin, the archbishop there, put out a call for Catholic hospitals in the city to mesh together into a sort of health care facility network. (Sorry no links -- a lot of this stuff is older and dug up from archives.) Bernadin wanted to make sure that they could be economically viable, in part to ensure that there were hospitals around the city where those without health insurance or other means could be cared for.

No doubt, RHC has taken Bernadin's call seriously, moving to corner the market by gobbling up existing community hospitals. The chain now includes eight hospitals and seven nursing facilities, and four retirement centers in Chicagoland.

Since all Resurrection facilities operate according to Catholic health care directives, suddenly the morning-after pill, tubal ligation (aka "getting your tubes tied"), an all other forms of contraception, were harder to get in Chicagoland. Still this forming of a web of Catholic hospitals was all well and good. Remember, Catholic hospitals were paragons of community care -- and especially, care for the indigent, those who often had no where else to go.

The kink in the system now is that it seems as if RHC isn't holding up its end of the deal. And I mean that in both a moral sense and a legal one. Approval of some of its mergers were contingent upon the continuation of care for the poor. Yet Resurrection acknowledged in 2004 that it had cut charity care by at least one-third. Illinois' Lieutenant Governor has accused RHC of failing to care for some poor while charging others exorbitant rates, and called on Cardinal George, the new archbishop of Chicago, to get RHC to live up to their mission. There has been one class action suit and then another, accusing Resurrection of overcharging or otherwise failing to care for the poor.

And at the same time, we have RHC employees growing fed up with the quality of care and conditions at their workplaces, and trying for years to form a union. RHC refuses to meet with them. Here again, seems like there's a great deal of daylight between how RHC is behaving and how Catholic teaching calls them to act. How's that? As much as health care is part of the church's ministry, union organizing is part of the church's teachings.

Catholic leaders have had much to say on the question of labor. Take for example, the recent U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishop's working paper called "A Fair and Just Workplace: Principles and Practices for Catholic Health Care." Then there's Pope John Paul II fascinating encyclical called Laborem Exercens (On Human Work) which details the Church's stand that we shouldn't get all hung up on labor in and of itself, but the person doing the laboring -- "man is the subject of work," John Paul wrote. It follows that Laborem Exercens should have whole section on the importance of unions titled, in fact, "The Importance of Unions":

The experience of history teaches that organizations of this type are an indispensable element of social life, especially in modern industrialized societies.

It's not as if John Paul made this union stuff up out of whole cloth. Zoom all the way back to Pope Leo XIII and what he says in his encyclical Rerum Novarum (On Capital and Labor):

History attests what excellent results were brought about by the artificers' guilds of olden times. They were the means of affording not only many advantages to the workmen, but in no small degree of promoting the advancement of art, as numerous monuments remain to bear witness. Such unions should be suited to the requirements of this our age—an age of wider education, of different habits, and of far more numerous requirements in daily life. It is gratifying to know that there are actually in existence not a few associations of this nature, consisting either of workmen alone, or of workmen and employers together, but it were greatly to be desired that they should become more numerous and more efficient. We have spoken of them more than once, yet it will be well to explain here how notably they are needed, to show that they exist of their own right, and what should be their organization and their mode of action.

It doesn't seem to much of a stretch to say that if RHC is a Catholic institution in spirit, then they should at the least entertain their workers notions of forming a union. A delegation of Catholic leaders wrote an open leader to RHC pushing them to sit down at a table with their employees (warning: pdf). The Illinois congressional delegation led by Jan Schakowsky and including Senators Durbin and Obama called on RHC CEO Joseph Toomey to just meet and talk already. Still, RHC refuses.

Am I reaching, or are there shades of Bill Donohue and the Catholic League in the Resurrection situation? If you're not going to act Catholic (or Jewish, or...), no more reaping the benefits of being treated as such.