Britons debate cost of hospital chaplains

CANTERBURY, England (RNS/ENI) A British secularist group has called on the government to end public support for hospital chaplains, saying the government has no business in paying the salaries of religious clergy. The National Secular Society (NSS) has sent a report to Britain’s Health Minister, Alan Johnson, calling for a review of hospital chaplaincy services […]

CANTERBURY, England (RNS/ENI) A British secularist group has called on the government to end public support for hospital chaplains, saying the government has no business in paying the salaries of religious clergy.

The National Secular Society (NSS) has sent a report to Britain’s Health Minister, Alan Johnson, calling for a review of hospital chaplaincy services with a view to ending taxpayer funding for them.

“People are shocked to learn from us that chaplaincy services are costing the hard-pressed (publicly funded) National Health Service more than 40 million pounds ($60 million) a year,” Keith Porteous Wood, chief executive of the NSS, told Ecumenical News International.


“This amount of money would pay for around another 1,300 nurses or over 2,645 cleaning staff,” said Porteous Wood. “I believe that the vast majority of people in Britain would say they’d go for extra nurses and cleaners and not religious services in hospitals by priests, imams and rabbis.”

The Rev. Chris Swift, a former president of the College of Health Care Chaplains, told the BBC that the secularists’ report was based on “erroneous and simplistic assumptions” and that it did not delve “into the real work those chaplains from all faiths carry out in the NHS on a daily basis in often emotionally fraught situations.”

Peter Kearney, a spokesman for the Roman Catholic Church in Scotland, however, told ENI in an interview: “The Catholic Church in Scotland agrees that religious and spiritual care-ers should not be employed by the NHS or funded by the NHS.”

The debate comes at a time when the major political parties in Britain are making predictions of hefty public service cutbacks in years to come because of the massive debt the government has built up.

“We are not asking for an end to chaplaincy services,” said the secularist group’s president, Terry Anderson, “but we are asking that the taxpayer not be made responsible for funding them.”

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