The Assunta Hospital Dilemma
By a concerned malaysian
The Assunta hospital was founded by a group of missionaries from the Franciscan Missionaries of Mary in the year 1954. In the tradition of the catholic church it pioneered care for the poor and underpriviledged needing medical assistance. It opened its doors based purely on the goodwill of generous people who seeing the good intentions of the nuns provided all that they needed.
Many of the wings of the hospital are donated by individuals who seeing the good work of the nuns gave large sums of money to expand to accomodate the growing number of poor and underpriviledged who were coming to the hospital for care.
Many fund raising events were promoted and Archbishop Murphy Pakiam and Dato Peter Mooney even graced these occassions .
The primary purpose of the hospital was to provide healthcare to the poor and underpriviledged in the tradition of the caring spirit of the FMM sisters
The Assunta Foundation was established as a “charitable” hospital catering exclusively to the poor and underpriviledged, and in the name of charity much money was collected and used to expand the hospital.
The Assunta foundation has been now sidelined to merely collecting funds to help needy people needing help with cancer treatment, the latest being the “DontDuckIt” campaign
The Assunta foundation and the Catholic church in Malaysia has been faced with a lot of allegations that the original vision of the Assunta foundation from being “charitable” has now turned into a private hospital catering for the rich.
The questions that need to be asked and addressed are :-
1) How did a charitable foundation become a “private” entity?
2) Was a charitable foundation ( hospital ) built on funds donated by the public, sold or given away merely because the original trustees felt like giving it up?
3) How did the FMM sisters a catholic religious order of nuns whose primary vocation was caring for the needy and poor in the areas where they are established suddenly change the direction of their calling?
It is time that The Malaysian catholic church came out and publicy answer to these allegations truthfully , so that this “ghost” can be put to rest.
Thank You,
A Deeply concerned Malaysian.
