The irony isn’t lost on Holy Cross Health’s Rudy Molinet that the Catholic hospital he oversees provides some of the best healthcare to thousands of LGBTQ patients throughout South Florida.
“Frankly, as a faith-based hospital, it's really even more important, right?” said Molinet, Holy Cross’ board chair since 2024 – and an out gay man with 40 years of healthcare management experience.
“Because for many of us – I grew up Catholic – for many of us, there's a modicum of institutional trauma with the church. We not only feel like we are healing people's bodies, but we're also providing spiritual healing,” Molinet said. “When people walk into Holy Cross, they know whomever they are, and specifically the LGBTQ community, that they're going to be treated with respect and with dignity. And that's really important.”
Holy Cross Health has 47 locations throughout the Fort Lauderdale area, including the main hospital complex at 4725 N Federal Hwy. and Holy Cross Medical Group – Wilton Manors, 1402 NE 26th St., which focuses on the LGBTQ community.
“Holy Cross' geographic footprint is based on strategy, growth, and community need. The decision to open a primary care clinic 25 years ago in Wilton Manors was intentional. It was a community needing access to healthcare,” said Kim Saiswick, Holy Cross’ vice president of Community Health & Well-Being.
“The Wilton Manors primary-care office – the first and premier healthcare provider for our LGBTQ community – celebrates its 25th anniversary this year,” said Saiswick, who joined Holy Cross in 1997. “The office has served as a beacon to individuals seeking primary healthcare.”
Molinet said the Wilton Manors clinic opened “when no one else was in the community helping us.”
Holy Cross has been “very, very deliberate in being visible” throughout the community, he said.
“We are everywhere. We're at every event. Kim's team does that, but not only Kim's team: in our donor base, in our doctors’ offices. We actually launched about two years ago an LGBTQ-specific page on our website. We call it by name, we have a message there from our leadership. We have Pride symbols and things of that nature,” Molinet said.
“We actually have a list of allied physicians, physicians who have voluntarily said, ‘Yeah, I'm allied with the community.’ And that list continues to grow. And it talks about the specific healthcare needs. When you go into that – and with a faith-based hospital – people take notice. Like, ‘Wow!’”
Molinet said Holy Cross’ commitment “continues to grow.”
“For example, we now attend Pride. We do a lot of prevention work in the community. A lot of organizations do that. They come in for Pride, they do their booth and they leave,” he said. “But we stay here. We did everything from going to the bars, like at the Eagle with Mpox vaccines when monkeypox was the thing, to continuing to be involved with Pride [Fort Lauderdale], PrideFête, [Wilton Manors] Stonewall Pride and all the other events.”
Dr. Jason Ceavers, a Holy Cross primary-care physician at the Wilton Manors clinic, isn’t Catholic, but he grew up and is still active in a Kendall-area Greek Orthodox church.
Ceavers, 35, attended medical school at Florida International University and finished his University of Miami/Holy Cross residency in 2022. In December, OutSFL readers named him “Best Doctor in Broward.”
“When I interviewed [at Holy Cross] for the residency program, you can tell that there was something a little bit different. I wouldn't have expected it myself, but it was very much non-judgmental with every physician that I met and every nurse that we talked to during interview day.”
After the interview, Ceavers said he “left feeling like, ‘Wow, that's where I want to work.’”
“I did not want to work anywhere else. Miami is known for its LGBTQ community, but even the place I interviewed down there, I asked, ‘So if I wanted to have an LGBTQ-focused initiative, what would that look like?’ And [the interviewer] basically told me that ‘In this clinic, you wouldn't be able to do that, but I can introduce you to someone downtown and you can work on it that way.’
“When I brought that up at Holy Cross, and when I was talking directly with the prior CEO, he was like, ‘You just tell me and if we're able to support you in any way, we will.’ And that's the difference between us and a lot of other places.”
Ceavers said about 100 patients visit the Wilton Manors clinic every day and that he personally treats “between 20 and 25” daily. He spends about 20 minutes with each patient, mostly talking and listening to them.
“Everyone gets different treatment depending on what it is that we're told,” he says. “If someone comes in and says they have burning when they urinate, well I need to know, ‘Are you a top? Are you a bottom? Are you into sounding? Is there anything else I should know?’ Because all those have different treatments, different kinds of bacteria requiring different antibiotics. But if we don't know that, then we can't really do our best job in helping and treating patients.
“At the end of the day, the thing I consider my job to be the most is advocating and helping patients. And the more I get told, the more I know about someone, the more I can help.”
The Wilton Manors clinic is staffed by LGBTQ people and allies. And the entire Holy Cross staff has been trained to understand the specific healthcare needs of LGBTQ clients, Molinet said.
“Not just healthcare needs, but psychological needs,” he said. “We need to be treated with dignity and with respect. And those are kind of the themes that I think we are very excited about at Holy Cross.”
Holy Cross is in the process of interviewing candidates to be the health group’s next CEO. “I'm the co-chair of that interview panel,” Molinet said. “And as the first openly LGBTQ chair of the hospital – openly gay married man – I have a place at the table. And, therefore, our community has a place at the table.”
Molinet, who is married to Wilton Manors psychotherapist Jeff Shearer, realizes “it’s a legit concern” that many LGBTQ people are hesitant to be treated at a Catholic hospital.
“If you don't know and you see a cross on the building – I talk a lot about this,” Molinet said. “We consider ourselves to be a ministry. We consider ourselves to be a transformational and compassionate ministry. And it's in the spirit of the gospel because it's a faith-based organization. And what that means for me and what it means at Holy Cross is in the broader spirit of inclusion that is the spirit of the gospel.
"Jesus didn't hang out with the elite, right? He hung out with the marginalized. And the Sisters of Mercy, who were called to run the hospital 65 years ago, have a long history of being social activists,” Molinet said. “Jim Crow was still alive and well. You could not be a Black doctor and practice in any of the hospitals except for the quote-unquote Black hospital, which was Provident Hospital in the Sistrunk neighborhood.”
In the early days of the Civil Rights Movement, the Sisters of Mercy led by Sister Innocent “didn’t have to answer to anybody,” Molinet said.
“Literally overnight, she took the signs down – the ‘colored’ fountains, the ‘white’ fountains – integrated the hospital, hired Black physicians. That’s very much in our DNA. And as it now extends to the LGBTQ community, we have two sisters who serve on the board. That’s in our charter. And they are some of the most allied board members that we have.”
Holy Cross health professionals provide primary care, HIV/AIDS and PrEP/PEP services, women’s healthcare and some gender-affirming care.
“We do work with trans patients. We have a number of them. We have an endocrinologist who's very, very, LGBTQ allied. And our physicians are, as well,” Molinet said. “We don't look at people based on who they love or how they present their gender. We look at people based on what they need from us as a healthcare system, and that's really important. It makes me really proud, especially for a Catholic hospital.”
Molinet acknowledges, however, there are limits to the types of services offered at Holy Cross.
“That’s a tough one, to be frank. There are some things that we don't do as a Catholic hospital, like sterilization procedures,” he said. “And by the way, that's whether you are trans or cisgender. That is due to our religious directives. Those are non-negotiables, but that doesn't mean we can't help people access that care and put them in touch with the right provider that can provide that.”
Molinet, who is an adjunct professor at Florida Atlantic University’s College of Business and a member of the American College of Health Executives, has a rich, decades-long history of involvement in South Florida’s queer community.
He served as president and board member of the Key West Historic Architectural Review Commission; is a past chair of HIV/AIDS service agency Health Crisis Network (now known as Care Resource), and was a founding board member of SAVE LGBT.
After Molinet joined the Holy Cross board in 2022, some friends asked why he would assume leadership at a Catholic hospital and whether parent company Trinity Health knew he is gay.
“I said, ‘Everybody knows I’m gay. I’ve been out for 40 years.’ Frankly, one of the reasons I was asked to serve on the board was because the leadership of the organization felt that we needed to have representation from a very large constituency of who we serve.”
Holy Cross makes sure the public knows the hospital values its LGBTQ client base. Beneath Molinet’s photo on his Holy Cross profile web page is this large-type quote:
“I joined the Board because I believe in the mission and want to use my healthcare leadership experience to affirm and expand the Holy Cross Health ministry to underrepresented communities, including the Hispanic and LGBTQ+ communities.”
For more information
What: Holy Cross Medical Group – Wilton Manors
Services include: Primary care, LGBTQ+ health, HIV and PrEP/PEP care, depression screening, women’s health
Where: 1402 NE 26th St., Wilton Manors
Hours: Every day from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Contact: 954-565-7789
Journalist Steve Rothaus covered LGBTQ issues for 22 years at the Miami Herald.
