I thank the Lord of Life for the workings of Divine Providence! In July 2019, I uprooted my family, happily living just outside Paris, and succeeded John Haas as president of The National Catholic Bioethics Center (NCBC), which he has built up over so many years. In fact, Dr. Haas, as president emeritus, continues to help me so much it would not be accurate to say he is now only part-time.

The ethicists and staff of the NCBC welcomed and edified me in so many ways. It is hard to find the right words to express the depth of my gratitude. Their faithfulness to the Catholic moral tradition is beautiful and necessary in a modern world so full of confusion and relativism.

The support and encouragement I received from our board of directors, led by Archbishop Gregory Aymond of New Orleans, sustained me. We have a wonderful mix of the top prelates in the country and exceptional lay leaders on our board.

The NCBC provides a vital service to the Church in the USA and beyond by assisting ordinary people, professionals, and institutions to discern the Truth and what is the moral way forward in complicated and thorny bioethical questions. What a blessing that since 1972 the Center has strived to be a rock of Catholic orthodoxy in medical ethics and bioethics for our bishops and Catholic health care ministries!

Who has not experienced new challenges in the last few months? All I can say is that the last twelve months seemed specially designed by God to test my mettle. My first month on the job I was “welcomed” by a Catholic health system that discontinued providing the Center with accreditation for continuing medical education (CME) credits for our two-day seminars in Catholic health care ethics. They claimed that our values were no longer “aligned” with theirs and refused to state exactly what the problem was. Our strong suspicion is that they disagreed with our defense of the Church’s stance on sexual orientation and gender identity issues.

Almost immediately afterwards, a printer refused to work with us to bring out a publication that denounced abortion and the gender agenda. All this long before the Supreme Court’s shocking Bostock ruling turned on its head the common wisdom of humanity from the dawn of time regarding sexual identity.  

Little surprises, like the roof of our beautiful Saint Katharine’s Hall leaking badly, also popped up. We are told it will need to be replaced at an estimated $200,000 cost. After assessing our options, we are planning to sell the building and start an endowment for the Center. Financial challenges, but also blessings, have been a hallmark of my tenure as NCBC president so far.

COVID-19 certainly threw more financial troubles in our path, but some remarkably faithful supporters and the federal Paycheck Preservation Program really helped us to get through the pandemic-induced financial crunch.

When the coronavirus plague and the response to it showed that we faced unprecedented difficulties, it was clearly a “sink or swim” moment. Institutions were quickly divided into “essential” and “non-essential” categories. Our ethicists and staff proved that the Center could meet this crisis head on. We were forced to start teleworking and teleconferencing, but the NCBC produced more materials, ethics consultations, and media interventions in the span of weeks than we would normally be able to do in months of “normal” activity. In fact, one of our remarkably talented staff members redesigned and launched our new website during the height of the pandemic!

Just as I was starting to get accustomed to an exhausting but also exhilarating “new normal,” I suffered two v-tach-induced cardiac arrests in the middle of the night. My wife acted swiftly and secured life-saving help from heroic first responders. I have already described part of the experience in a previous article. Suffice it to say that nearly dying and being denied access to the sacraments in a secular hospital because of their draconian pandemic restrictions only strengthened my resolve to help lead the fight for religious liberty rights through my position at the NCBC.

God is so good. I was only in the hospital a few days and suffered minimal long-term health consequences. I now have a small implanted cardioverter defibrillator in my chest as insurance against another dangerous arrythmia, and I can continue to work. The Lord granted me more time on earth and dramatically drew my attention to the tragedy of so many patients being denied the sacraments and dying alone in hospitals or nursing homes. Please pray with me that I do not to squander this new lease on life.

So what does Divine Providence have in store for the future? The NCBC is embarking on an ambitious strategic planning cycle to position ourselves for the next 3–5 years and launching new initiatives.

We are now proposing to dioceses across the nation our Catholic Health Insurance Ethics Review (CHIER). This will help the Church to remain true to her teachings in the coverage provided by employee health plans. The CHIER program joins our Catholic Identity and Ethics Review (CIER) service geared to help Catholic hospitals follow sound policies and practices that witness to the Catholic vision of health care. The NCBC education department shall be adding videos to our online courses, and we are planning a series of webinars for members. The Center will publish new items for sale like the recently added Catholic Guide to Palliative Care and Hospice.

My confident hope is that the NCBC will grow and thrive in the years to come as one of the foremost promoters of the God-bestowed dignity of the human person as beautifully proclaimed by the Catholic Church.

Joseph Meaney, President, The National Catholic Bioethics Center