For-profit and Catholic: how would the ministry fare?
Let's begin with Catholic identity. When is something entitled to be called Catholic in any official sense? I would suggest that there are three requirements. First of all, the entity must assert and claim its identity as Catholic by some sort of public declaration. By way of counter-example, in early 2012, a major West Coast health system renamed itself Dignity Health and asserted that it is no longer Catholic. According to Dignity Health's Jan. 23 press release, it is a "not-for-profit organization, rooted in the Catholic tradition, but is not an official ministry of the Catholic Church". Secondly, this Catholic identity has to be validated by Catholic Church authority, usually the bishop of the place, but sometimes by a dicastery in Rome. There is not really a formal procedure for this. Typically, a religious congregation founds an organizational ministry with the implicit, if not explicit, consent of the bishop and has it listed in the Catholic directory of
Catholic Health Partners, Cincinnati, USA.
Sister Doris Gottemoeller
D002410:Catholicism; D016519:Hospitals, Religious / Q000191:economics*; D015279:Organizational Culture; D014481:United States