” ““As Catholic chaplains, we are worried that the needs of the Catholics in the English and Welsh hospitals may remain unfulfilled”. The denunciation is contained in a statement made by thirty British Catholic chaplains at the end of a meeting, which was attended by the archbishop of Birmingham, Vincent Nichols. “We ask the hospitals to let us serve our office by providing us with the information we need”. The 1998 Privacy Act forbids British hospitals to disclose information about the patients’ religion, and therefore it should be the patients themselves who should expressly ask to meet a priest. According to Tom Williams, auxiliary bishop of Liverpool and spokesman for the Catholic chaplains, the new legislation has engendered a state of confusion. “If a patient is hospitalised, he has to contact a chaplain beforehand if he wants to meet him. If he is in a state of unconsciousness, he obviously cannot do it, and we priests can only hope he has some document on himself to state he’s a Catholic “.
