Fr. Lawrence Biondi to Resign from TENET Board of Directors

Just received this email from
The Cardinal Newman Society

Tenet Healthcare Corporation has announced that Rev. Lawrence Biondi, S.J., president of St. Louis University, will resign from its board of directors in May.

Last summer, CNS members sent hundreds of letters and e-mail messages to Biondi urging him to forego re-election to Tenet's board. At the time, Biondi refused and remained chairman of the ethics committee for the national chain of 114 hospitals, including some that perform abortions.
Biondi served on the board since 1998 and was eligible for payments of more than $100,000 annually for his services.

Tenet refused to disclose the exact number of its hospitals that perform abortions, but it confirmed that each Tenet hospital is permitted to choose whether to perform abortions. Catholic Funds Inc., a Milwaukee-based Catholic financial services company that uses two professional screening services to identify businesses that are offensive to Catholic donors, said that both screeners identify Tenet as complicit in abortion.

According to the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, which tracks abortions and the facilities where they are performed, Tenet-owned MetroWest Medical Center in Framingham performed 166 abortions in the year 2000 -- the last year for which statistics are available. Other Tenet hospitals in California, Florida, Georgia, and Pennsylvania reportedly perform abortions. The Tenet Healthcare Foundation, an affiliated philanthropy, gave $8,500 in 2002 and $8,000 in 2001 to Planned Parenthood clinics in California, Illinois and Texas.