DALLAS — Every two years the National Catholic Bioethics Center holds its “bishops’ workshop” to examine some of the more difficult issues in bioethics.

This year the workshop — one of the largest regular meetings of bishops, aside from episcopal conferences — was held Feb. 3-6 in Dallas. Although numbers were slightly down this year, almost 150 attended from Canada, the United States, Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean and the Philippines.

“The ministry of Catholic health care is based on a rich anthropology,” the Boston-based center's mission states. “The care of the whole person, body, mind, soul and spirit is the distinguishing characteristic of an authentically Catholic health care ministry.”

The conference this year focused on the “The Challenge of Cooperation in a Pluralistic Society” and took up the complicated moral and legal issues that arise from cooperation between Catholic and non-Catholic hospitals.

Dr. John Baker, a law professor from Louisiana State University, warned that legal advice and insurance company demands can often put Catholic doctors and hospitals in danger of cooperating in evil acts.

For example, he warned that in the era of “wrongful birth” lawsuits, insurance companies might tell doctors they are legally obliged to inform patients about the option of abortion in the case of fetal abnormality.

“That's not the law, besides being morally impermissible,” he said.

Catholic doctors could avoid such suits with a simple disclaimer, signed by all patients, that makes it clear that abortion information is not provided.

“Such a doctor may lose some patients,” Baker said, “but that is the cost of being a Catholic doctor faithful to the moral law.”

Other workshop presentations sought to develop the fundamental approach Catholics should adopt in presenting Catholic moral teaching on bioethical issues. Speakers also addressed issues drawn from recent events, such as the ethics of vaccination programs aimed at countering bio-terrorism and pastoral care for the victims of sexual assault.

The bishops’ workshop does not produce resolutions or policies but serves as a forum to bring bishops up to date on the latest developments in bioethics. The costs of the bishops’ workshop are underwritten by the Knights of Columbus.

“A Catholic approach has to take into account that secular humanism is powerful and claims to provide an immediate solution to human problems,” argued Cardinal Francis George of Chicago, who serves on the National Catholic Bioethics Center board of directors. The president of the National Catholic Bioethics Center is Dr. John Haas, a former Register columnist.

“Yet its limits are evident, not least in the current malaise in our society and its fears about the future. … The transformative power of the cross has to be brought to bear on the human situation through the holy lives of ordinary Catholics,” Cardinal George said.

The “transformative” power of grace was also the theme struck by Father Romanus Cessario of St. John's Seminary in Boston. He argued that it does not serve a bishop well to engage in fine moral arguments about dubious practices in Catholic hospitals if the result does not present a robustly Catholic view to the culture.

“When someone walks into a Catholic hospital and knows that there are abortions being done on the fifth floor, it does not help very much to say that that part of the hospital is outside the bishop's jurisdiction,” Father Cessario said, alluding to some of the complex arrangements worked out between Catholic hospitals in joint ventures with hospitals that do abortions and sterilizations.

“Bishops may wish to think of Catholic hospitals more in eucharistic rather than managerial terms,” Father Cessario added, explaining that the Eucharist is the greatest “transformation” possible, and so too Catholic hospitals can transform their environments. “Is this pie-inthe-sky thinking? Not if we take seriously Pope John Paul II's call to transform culture.”

Father Raymond J. de Souza filed this story from Texas.