SW News: Rev. Patrick Pullicino, a Roman Catholic priest in the United Kingdom, is suing a public hospital trust after he was reportedly removed from a National Health Service (NHS) facility after addressing a patient's inquiry regarding the church's teachings on sexuality and marriage.
According to Fox News, the episode happened in August 2019 when a Catholic patient at a British National Health Service hospital asked the priest to join him on a walk. Throughout the course of their walk, the patient informed the priest of his intentions to marry his same-sex partner and sought the priest's view on the matter. The priest gave a biblical response, but he did not insist that the patient accept it.
The priest eventually learned his words culminated in a court lawsuit. And therefore, Vanessa Ford, interim chief executive of the South West London and St. George's Mental Health NHS Trust, allegedly said in a written response to the complaint that the trust's policy on equality and diversity takes precedence above religious belief.
Nevertheless, the priest's lawyers asserted that the hospital terminated the priest's job while he was on annual leave in January 2020.
Pullicino was let go due to "budgetary restrictions," despite his modest pay and willingness to serve for free. Along with the Christian Legal Center, he is suing the Trust for harassment, religious discrimination, and persecution. Pullicino said that there was no one to help Catholic patients or offer sacraments after he departed the hospital.
Pullicino said psychiatric patients were vulnerable and needed spiritual help since certain mental illnesses, like schizophrenia, made it hard to discriminate between the spiritual and the personal, creating anguish. "Such persons require spiritual care above anything else," he added.
The court hearing will be held at the Croydon Employment Tribunal in July, as reported by Fox News.
In 2019, Pullicino was ordained as a Catholic priest after a successful career in the NHS as a consultant neurologist, where he became known for his part in uncovering the abuses of the Liverpool Care Pathway, an end-of-life practice that was rendered inert.