The removal of weekly services for Latter-day Saints, Catholics and Protestants at Salt Lake City’s Veterans Affairs Medical Center has alarmed staffers, volunteers and Utah’s four U.S. House members, who argue the federal hospital has fallen short of its legal mandate to provide religious accommodations for patients.
According to the Veterans Affairs website, chaplains are tasked with, among other duties, “[performing] religious-specific ceremonies or services.”
However, a letter — signed by Reps. Burgess Owens, John Curtis, Celeste Maloy and Blake Moore — accuses the administration of the George E. Wahlen Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center of “grossly inadequate provision of religious services and accommodations,” which it argues represents a “serious and systemic failure to uphold the legally guaranteed rights of V.A. employees and patients.”
(Leah Hogsten | The Salt Lake Tribune) Utah Rep. Burgess Owens, along with Reps. John Curtis, Celeste Maloy and Blake Moore, signed a letter expressing deep concern about the removal of faith-specific services at the V.A. hospital in Salt Lake City.
The “most egregious” example, the Republican lawmakers write, is “the complete absence of religious services for patients who have explicitly requested to attend such services.”
The facility’s decision to opt instead for a nondenominational “Nuggets of Faith” service, they add, fails to account for “the diverse religious needs of V.A. employees and patients,” many of whom are affiliated with Utah’s predominant faith, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Unlike the canceled services, this interfaith gathering takes place “only occasionally,” according to Latter-day Saint volunteer and veteran Jay Lisonbee.
V.A. press secretary Terrence Hayes countered that “the spiritual well-being of veteran patients is a priority” for the V.A.’s Salt Lake City health care system, which is “fully committed to providing services and support to all veterans — including those who are a part of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.”
The changes in services correspond with the arrival last year of a new chief of Chaplain Service, Lorna Graham.
Under her leadership, a weekly, volunteer-led Latter-day Saint sacrament meeting, the faith’s principal worship service, was informed it no longer could meet on-site. The V.A. said this decision was due to the services, which had been held regularly since the 1970s, “being used for an audience broader than veteran patients and their families.”
According to Lisonbee, an estimated 25 outside volunteers participated in the meeting, which generally drew five to seven patients.
This, plus the fact that services were led by nonstaffers, “did not align with V.A. policy,” the hospital said, “or [LDS] Church guidelines.”
V.A. leadership emphasized that it “worked with LDS leaders throughout this transition” and “have been listening to veterans every step of the way to ensure that there is no unmet demand for services at our facility.”
Juan Becerra, a spokesperson for the Utah-based faith, declined to comment, saying instead to direct any questions to the V.A.
In a Tuesday town hall held by local and national V.A. Chaplain Service leaders, the lay Latter-day Saint branch president of the congregation that had been meeting at the medical facility drew a contrast between the hospital’s decision and similar institutions in Utah.
“Virtually every midsize or large hospital or skilled nursing facility here along the Wasatch Front and even down into St. George has a branch of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints offering the sacred sacrament service,” Doug Hammer, a former senior employee for Intermountain Healthcare, said. “The only facility that does not is the V.A. Medical Center.”
The V.A. did not supply an interview with Graham.
Other limits imposed
The decision to disallow the congregation to meet on-site, it seems, was not the sole shift away from faith-specific, individualized care for patients.
Around the time weekly services ended, chaplains were discouraged from providing individual pastoral care beyond an initial “spiritual assessment” and group therapy, said Kenneth Smith, a Latter-day Saint who briefly worked as a chaplain at the hospital earlier this year.
Meanwhile, Lisonbee said, badge-holding Chaplain Service volunteers — Latter-day Saints trained by the hospital to provide one-on-one care to patients of the same faith — were dismissed and informed that their help no longer was needed.
The result of these policy shifts, Lisonbee said, was that patients today receive far less spiritual care — including, in the case of Latter-day Saint patients, priesthood blessings and the sacrament, or Communion — than they did under the previous administration.
Hayes pushed back on this assertion, explaining that the V.A. works with church leaders from the surrounding community to “promptly” fill any spiritual support patients request and that the medical center is “actively working to acquire LDS chaplain services.”
(Veterans Affairs) V.A. press secretary Terrence Hayes said in a statement that “the spiritual well-being of veteran patients is a priority” for the V.A.'s Salt Lake City health care system.
Lisonbee noted that requests typically arise only when volunteers and chaplains are allowed to interact freely with patients. He estimated that, these days, he helps coordinate the delivery of the sacrament to an average of three veterans a week, as opposed to 12 or so before Graham’s arrival.
“You have to ask the right questions,” he said, “for there to be any requests.”
For his part, Smith, the Latter-day Saint who worked as a chaplain at the hospital earlier this year, said that when he encouraged the administration to reestablish the volunteer-led Latter-day Saint worship services, his suggestion was met with hostility.
Among other things, he recalled, hospital leadership argued that “since Mormonism is Christian, then there is no need” for a Latter-day Saint-specific worship service.
Smith, who explained he was recruited out of retirement in January expressly to help the facility better serve its Latter-day Saint patients, was “shocked.” He raised his concerns with higher-ups and, he said, was punished — first with a reassignment to food services and, second, with a pink slip in May.
Not all hospital employees oppose the measures.
Speaking at the Tuesday town hall, a nurse, who did not provide her full name, said she “really appreciated the standardization” and interfaith emphasis under the new leadership. Among other things, she said she believed the changes would “help protect veterans from proselytizing.”
‘She went off on me about my religion’
A Latter-day Saint patient, who asked not to be named out of fear of online retribution, described an instance in which Graham entered her room only to become hostile when she found the woman reading the Book of Mormon, her faith’s foundational scripture.
“She went off on me about my religion,” remembered the veteran, who has since been released from the hospital. “[Graham] said that she had seen on YouTube where the church had misused large amounts of money [and examples of] child abuse and members using profane language over the pulpit. I was in shock.”
When asked if Graham ever spoke poorly to Latter-day Saint patients about their faith, Hayes stated that “while we cannot comment on ongoing investigations,” the facility “takes allegations of employee misconduct very seriously, and we investigate all allegations and take swift and appropriate action. There is no place for discrimination at V.A., and we are fully committed to serving veterans of all faiths.”
For their part, Smith and Lisonbee remain adamant that by failing, as they see it, to meet the individual spiritual needs of the hospital’s patients, the V.A. is not only preventing necessary care but also the free exercise of religion.
“The veterans there fought for these rights and now to have them trampled on and ignored — it’s wrong,” Lisonbee said. “That’s not what they fought for.”
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