Ethics: Stewardship and Catholic Health Care

There is an ethical issue closely related to philanthropy that also is a core value for many Catholic health care systems and included in the “Shared Statement of Identity for the Catholic Health Care Ministry.”¹ That value is stewardship. Some have suggested that “stewardship is the recurring theme in the Catholic social tradition that speaks most clearly to how and why people should care about the commons.”² Yet, it would actually be difficult to find the term stewardship mentioned at all in the Catholic social tradition.³ And often in the more general literature (and likely in the minds of many in health care), stewardship has been limited to the notion of good financial management.