The largest Catholic health system in the nation has allegedly funded and performed transgender surgeries and other “gender-affirming” medical interventions, defying traditional Catholic teachings, according to an investigative report released to The Epoch Times.

The report by the Lepanto Institute, a Catholic research and education organization, released on June 12, exposes CommonSpirit Health, a Catholic entity, for its alleged performance and funding of transgender surgeries and therapies,” including prescribing and providing cross-sex hormones and puberty blockers to patients.

A promotional video accompanying the report asserts: “The transgender craze has seized the world by the throat and is choking the life out of the bedrock of civilization: the family. And this is happening right under the nose of the Vatican.”

In the 64-page exposé, “CommonSpirit and the Sex-Change Industry,” author Michael Hichborn, founder and president of the Lepanto Institute, explains the connections within the Catholic health network in the United States and its direct ties to the Vatican.

Hichborn, a self-described lifelong Catholic, said he is both “saddened” and “horrified” by the moral decline within factions of the Catholic Church, and wants “to make sure that Catholics are Catholics and that those who operate in the name of the Catholic Church do so in line with all of her teachings.”

He claims that these medical interventions are happening in “gross defiance” of official values held by the Catholic Church, which has traditionally rejected transgenderism, homosexuality, abortions, and contraception—all of which the report alleges CommonSpirit is promoting at dozens of hospitals and medical facilities in the U.S.

“In addition to performing sex-change operations, CommonSpirit provides employee benefits that cover sex-change operations, transgender hormone treatments, and even puberty blockers for kids,” according to the report.

While it’s not known if CommonSpirit Health has performed transgender surgeries on children, the use of puberty blockers suggests it is treating minors for gender dysphoria in some capacity, Hichborn told The Epoch Times.

“The horrifying thing when you start getting into the science of the puberty blockers and the transitional hormones, is they do permanent damage to these kids. They talk about how puberty blockers just kind of put a pause on puberty or pubertal development, and that’s a lie,” he said. “It doesn’t put a pause on it; it actually damages these kids to the point that many of them wind up being sterile.”

CommonSpirit Health derives its Catholic identity from the Catholic Health Care Federation whose authority is granted by the Vatican’s Congregation for the Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life in Rome, the report states.

“The only authority in the church that has the ability to judge the actions of CommonSpirit is the Vatican,” Hichborn told The Epoch Times. “Because CommonSpirit is a subsidiary of the Catholic Health Care Federation, it is subject only to the Pope and the Pope’s governing bodies in Rome.”

Internal Revenue Service (IRS) 990 forms not only confirm that CommonSpirit Health benefits from religious exemption tax breaks, but that the organization is part of the Catholic Church, Hichborn said.

CommonSpirit has allegedly promoted the LGBT agenda including transgender ideology and transitioning children in its podcasts and at its conferences, has raised funds for sex-change surgical equipment, performed surgical sterilizations, and at least one of its hospitals has reportedly performed elective abortions, the report indicates.

Felicity Simmons, the communications director at CommonSpirit Health, did not respond to multiple inquiries.

On Feb. 1, 2019, CommonSpirit Health published a press release announcing that Dignity Health and Catholic Health Initiatives “have come together as CommonSpirit Health” to create a new nonprofit Catholic health system in 21 states.

The report lists 26 hospitals run by Dignity Health, a CommonSpirit subsidiary, and another 12 operated by Virginia Mason Franciscan Health (VMFH) that offer “transgender health care” services. Two of the hospitals—Saint Francis Memorial Hospital in San Francisco (SFMH) and Virginia Mason Medical Center in Seattle—allegedly perform sex-change surgeries.

“Included in the list of surgical procedures provided by CommonSpirit’s Saint Francis Memorial Hospital are facial and body reconstructive surgeries to make the individual appear to be more masculine or feminine, genital reconstruction procedures, vocal alteration surgeries, and a host of other abominations,” according to the report.

The “Gender-Affirming Surgery” section of the VMFH website openly states the hospital group performs “top surgery,” “body contouring procedures,” and a variety of facial surgery options.

SFMH states on its “about us” page on the Dignity Health website, “As CommonSpirit Health, we make the healing presence of God known in our world by improving the health of the people we serve, especially those who are vulnerable, while we advance social justice for all.”

According to a historical timeline on the website and included in the report, Dr. Edward Falces performed the first ever transgender surgery in the United States at St. Francis Memorial Hospital in 1966.

“It was the very first one,” Hichborn said.

Over the years, more doctors began performing transgender surgeries, and by 2016 the Saint Francis Memorial Hospital Gender Institute was established. In 2019, the hospital hosted San Francisco’s first medical conference on transgender health, “marking the public launch of its Gender Institute with Transgender only surgeons.”

Dozens of Catholic hospitals in California state their policy is to refer patients to Saint Francis Memorial Hospital for sex-change operations known as “gender-affirming care.”

The hospital continues to pledge its commitment to the “LGBTQA+ community” to “provide crucial gender-affirming surgeries from expert surgeons to our transgender patients,” according to the website.

In 2020, the hospital earned an “LGBTQ Health Care Quality Leader” designation from the Human Rights Campaign Foundation.

The exposé notes that in 2021, after the hospital was acquired by CommonSpirit Health, it received the Surgical Review Corporation’s “Center of Excellence in Gender Confirmation Surgery Accreditation based on the number of surgeries performed at the hospital.”

Despite CommonSpirit’s promotional materials and policy statements asserting it is a Catholic organization bound to the Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services, “there is nothing Catholic about it, and it is operating in direct contravention of even the most basic notions of medical ethics derived in the Hippocratic Oath to ‘First, do no harm,’” the report states.

The Lepanto Institute’s mission is to expose organizations that claim the Catholic—or Christian—name but whose actions undermine fundamental Christian beliefs, Hichborn said. The organization chastises “dissident” and “apostate Catholics in politics and other prominent arenas” for “misrepresenting the faith,” stating it is “dedicated to the defense of the Catholic Church against assaults from without as well as from within.”

“The very notion that CommonSpirit is able to maintain an identity as a ‘Catholic’ organization defies every rule of logic and sound Christian principles,” Hichborn concludes in report. “CommonSpirit should be completely stripped of its Catholic identity along with all of its Catholic hospital members. … God, have mercy on us!”

The Lepanto Institute has published several reports and articles on the Catholic Campaign for Human Development and Catholic Relief Services which Hichborn says promote and finance the “transgender-homosexual agenda.”

The Catholic Campaign for Human Development “is not only giving money to organizations that are promoting abortion, contraception, homosexuality and Marxism, but they are lying to the people directly about where that money is going,” he said.