Abstract

Pollution results from humankind’s failure to be good stewards of creation. Guided by Catholic environmental bioethics, Catholic health care organizations have reduced their contribution to this pollution, but they also encounter its human cost. Catholic hospitals treat countless patients sickened by pollution, which most strongly impacts the poor and disenfranchised—those whom the Church expresses a preferential responsibility to care for, in part via the charity care that Catholic health care provides. The poor encounter another cost of pollution: the financial cost of seeking health care, particularly in the US. The authors argue that Catholic health care institutions should take the moral harm of pollution seriously by reducing the financial burden on those sickened by pollution. As an example, they highlight the situation of those sickened by lead exposure in the US and outline how Catholic health care institutions could consider lessening the financial burden of treating this sickness.