The 300-bed Divine Mercy Hospital near Bangladesh’s capital Dhaka will become the biggest Christian-run healthcare facility in the Muslim-majority nation when it opens in November this year.
The hospital, being built at a cost of  3 billion taka (US$ 28 million), is the signature project of Christian Cooperative Credit Union Limited (CCCUL) and has about 50,000 Catholic and Protestant members with total assets of 12 billion taka (US$ 110 million).
Founded on July 3, 1955 by American Holy Cross missionary, Father Charles J. Young, this lay-run organization is the largest non-banking financial organization in Bangladesh aiming to promote the socio-economic welfare of people, including the minority Christian community.
Young allowed clergy to be advisers of the union but ensured that decision-making powers rested with laypeople, which became the key to its success, says Nirmol Rozario, 62, the union’s former president and a lay Catholic.
Rozario, currently the president of the Bangladesh Christian Association (BCA), the country’s largest lay-run Christian forum, however, says the Church hierarchy lags behind in promoting lay people like Young did more than seven decades ago.
A democratic mind-set “does not exist in the hierarchy and its structure,” Rozario told UCA News.
Lay involvement is limited to membership in parish councils and diocesan advisory committees. And, most lay members of parish councils are selected based on “loyalty to clergy and the decision-making powers rests with the parish priest,” Rozario said.
“Clergymen should not consider themselves as super humans and look down upon laypeople,” he said, adding that priests should join hands with the laity for the common good of the Church “without egoism,” he said.