Priest pleads guilty to federal child sex exploitation charges

Pro life outreach in front of a Planned Parenthood location in San Antonio Texas in 2019. / B Merkle/Shutterstock

Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Nov 1, 2021 / 14:27 pm (CNA).
The U.S. Supreme Court spent nearly three hours Monday hearing arguments i… […]

Columbus, Ohio, Feb 20, 2019 / 04:36 pm (CNA).- A doctor at a Catholic health system in Ohio has been fired after being accused of prescribing excessive doses of drugs to at least 30 ailing patients, some near death and some not. The accusations have also prompted the suspension of 20 hospital staff and over a dozen lawsuits alleging wrongful death.

Mount Carmel Health System fired Dr. William Husel from his job on Nov. 21, 2018, accusing him of prescribing excessive pain medicine to 34 patients in the intensive care unit. All of the patients died over the period of 2015-2018, the Columbus Dispatch reports.

“We are sorry for this tragedy, and we will continue to investigate how we responded to this report and whether there is any other information that should have led us to investigate sooner into Dr. Husel’s practices,” Edward Lamb, president and CEO of Mount Carmel Health System, said Jan. 24.

In a previous Jan. 14 statement, Lamb said the doctor’s actions were “unacceptable and inconsistent with the values and practices of Mount Carmel, regardless of the reasons the actions were taken.”

“We take responsibility for the fact that the processes in place were not sufficient to prevent these actions from happening,” he said.

The hospital said it received a formal report about the apparent behavior on Oct. 25 of last year. An employee reported the behavior out of safety concerns. The hospital said it knows of three deaths that took place from the time it received the report about Husel to the time it fired him.

Of the 34 patients who received overdoses of the drugs under Husel, 33 died at Mount Carmel West primary care hospital in Columbus, while one died at Mount Carmel St. Ann’s in Westerville. The hospital believes a few of these deaths were not caused by the overdoses.

Mount Carmel Health System is the second-largest non-profit Catholic healthcare system in the state. It is a member of the Michigan-based system Trinity Health.

Husel treated patients taken to the ICU for various reasons, including respiratory problems, infections, and gallstones. Some families said their loved ones were not terminally ill and they would have questioned the use of the medication administered under the doctor’s orders.

The Franklin County Prosecutor’s Office and Columbus police are investigating but no formal charges have been filed, NBC News reports.

The Ohio State Medical Board suspended Husel’s medical license in January.

Many of the details of the alleged victims come from lawsuits, court filings, and plaintiffs’ attorneys.

In one case, lawyers with the Leeseburg & Valentine law firm said, the doctor ordered a large dose of fentanyl – an opioid – and midazolam – a sedative – to be administered to 57-year-old Michael Walters just minutes before the patient died.

Walters had resided at a nursing home for several years after a stroke. He was admitted to the hospital on Oct. 6, 2017 suffering from respiratory failure and brain swelling, and was placed on a breathing machine. Late on Oct. 10, his family was persuaded to change his status to do-not-resuscitate. He died the next day.

The family members of Janet Kavanaugh, 79, have filed a lawsuit against the doctor and the hospital. They said she received a lethal dose of fentanyl and pronounced dead 18 minutes later.

Lawyer Gerry Leeseberg, who filed the suit on behalf of Kavanaugh’s estate, said she had not consented to the high dose. He was not aware whether she had previously been given the drug for pain relief, NBC News reports.

“We’re concerned some of these families were misled into granting a do-not-resuscitate order,” Leeseberg said.

CNA sought comment from the Diocese of Columbus but did not receive a response by deadline.

The hospital released a statement and an apology on Jan. 14, the same day a patient filed a lawsuit. It removed 20 employees from patient care pending the results of its investigation, including nurses who administered the drugs and pharmacists.

Lamb, the health system head, said Jan. 24 that based on the initial report, the hospital system “should have begun a more expedited process to investigate and consider immediate removal of Dr. Husel from patient care at that time.”

More patients might be discovered as the investigation continues, he said.

According to Lamb, clinicians must provide “complete and clinically accurate” information about a patient’s condition, potential treatments, likelihood to recover and options for care. The investigation will determine whether this was the practice for the treatment of each of the patients.

“These events are heartbreaking,” said Lamb. “We are committed to being open and honest about what happened and what we are doing to ensure it never happens again.”

He pledged to respect the privacy and rights of those involved in accordance with privacy laws and to continue to cooperate with law enforcement and other relevant authorities.

For many of the patients, the doctor was able to use emergency overrides to bypass safeguards in the medication system. He was also able to avoid required pharmacist pre-approval.

A review from the Ohio Department of Health faulted the two hospitals for failing to ensure a system to prevent overrides that access large doses of “central nervous system” medications, the Columbus Dispatch reports.

The reports have already caused federal authorities to tell two hospitals in the health system they were non-compliant with Medicare standards for pharmaceuticals. They warned that the hospitals’ Medicare provider agreement would terminate on Feb. 24. Hospital leaders later agreed to a corrective plan and state oversight to ensure compliance.

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Pope Francis’ General Audience in St. Peter’s Square on March 29, 2023. / Daniel Ibanez/CNA

Vatican City, Mar 29, 2023 / 06:00 am (CNA).

Pope Francis on Wednesday spoke against a comfortable Christianity that keeps Jesus at arm’s length, rather than inviting him into the heart to change it.

“If one of us says, ‘Ah, thank you Lord, because I am a good person, I do good things, I do not commit major sins…’ this is not a good path, this is the path of self-sufficiency, it is a path that does not justify you, it makes you turn up your nose,” the pope said during his weekly public audience March 29.

He called this attitude being “an elegant Catholic, but an elegant Catholic is not a holy Catholic, he is elegant.”

“The true Catholic, the true Christian is one who receives Jesus within, which changes your heart,” Pope Francis said in St. Peter’s Square.

“This,” he continued, “is the question I ask you all today: What does Jesus mean for me? Did I let him enter my heart, or do I keep him within reach, but so that he does not really enter within? Have I let myself be changed by him? Or is Jesus just an idea, a theology that goes ahead…”

At his Wednesday general audience, the pope continued his reflections on evangelization and apostolic zeal with a catechesis centered on St. Paul’s transformation from a persecutor of Christians to a great evangelist.

St. Paul “was a man who was zealous about the law of Moses for Judaism, and after his conversion, this zeal continued, but to proclaim, to preach Jesus Christ,” Pope Francis explained. “Paul loved Jesus. Saul — Paul’s first name — was already zealous, but Christ converts his zeal.”

To better explain zeal, the pope referenced St. Thomas Aquinas, who taught that passion, from a moral perspective, is neither good nor bad: it depends on if it is used virtuously or sinfully.

“In Paul’s case, what changed him is not a simple idea or a conviction: it was the encounter, this word, it was the encounter with the risen Lord — do not forget this, it is the encounter with the Lord that changes a life — it was the encounter with the risen Lord that transformed his entire being,” the pope said.

“Paul’s humanity,” he added, “his passion for God and his glory was not annihilated, but transformed, ‘converted’ by the Holy Spirit.”

The pope noted that part of the change that takes place in Paul is his conversion from feeling righteous before God, and thus authorized to persecute, to arrest, and even to kill — to someone who, enlightened by God, recognizes himself to be a “blasphemer and persecutor.”

After recognizing what he had done, Paul becomes truly capable of loving, Francis said.

“If Jesus did not enter your life, it did not change,” he said. “You cannot be Christian only from the outside. No, Jesus must enter and this changes you, and this happened to Paul. It is finding Jesus, and this is why Paul said that Christ’s love drives us, it is what takes you forward.”

“This is zeal, when one finds Jesus and feels the fire, like Paul, and must preach Jesus, must talk about Jesus, must help people, must do good things,” he explained. “When one finds the idea of Jesus, he or she remains an ideologue of Christianity, and this does not justify, only Jesus justifies us. May the Lord help us find Jesus, encounter Jesus, and may this Jesus change our life from within and help us to help others.”

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