A reader wrote us last week to say the website confused her. She had read the What Is Vitae? page twice and still could not tell whether the clinic was part of the nonprofit or the nonprofit was part of the clinic. She was not being obtuse. The structure is genuinely unusual for a family-run Christian health project, and since a small number of readers will eventually become patients or donors or curriculum subscribers, it is worth spelling out plainly why the work is organized the way it is. The short version: two legal entities, one mission, one domain, and each entity does exactly the thing it is legally best at. The long version follows.
What the two entities are
There are two Rodriguez-family organizations in this project, and they are genuinely different kinds of creatures.
| Entity | Legal form | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Vitae Catholica, Inc. | Arizona 501(c)(3) nonprofit | Authors and publishes educational projects: the Quintivium K–12 curriculum, the Theology of the Body resource, the Natural Family Planning resource, Catholic bioethical counsel, and the free-to-read scholarly work on this website. |
| Vitae Health | DBA of Rodriguez Corporation (Arizona S-Corp) | Operates the telemedicine clinic. Pediatric wellness, developmental assessments, chronic-condition management, parent coaching, ESA-eligible visits, across Arizona and Wisconsin. |
Rodriguez Corporation is the older of the two entities. It is our family S-Corp, and it has operated in various clinical and consulting capacities since 2017. Vitae Health is a fictitious-name registration under Rodriguez Corporation, filed in Arizona, specifically for the telemedicine practice. Vitae Catholica, Inc. is the newer entity — founded in 2025 as an Arizona nonprofit corporation — and it has only one real job: to publish the Christian health formation work, for free or at the cost of printing.
Why not just do everything through the nonprofit?
This is the most common question we get, and it is a reasonable one. If the mission is unified, why not run the whole thing through the 501(c)(3)? The answer is that clinical practice and educational publishing are different legal and operational creatures, and the federal tax code, the state medical-practice acts, and the insurance-payer ecosystem all treat them differently. Trying to cram both activities into one nonprofit container creates friction in every direction — and would almost certainly compromise the charitable purpose that lets the nonprofit exist in the first place.
Three specific reasons:
1. Clinical accountability lives in a for-profit legal frame by default. State medical-practice laws, malpractice insurance carriers, telemedicine interstate licensure compacts, Medicare/Medicaid billing rules, and most private-payer contracts all assume the practicing entity is a professional corporation or a similar for-profit form. Nonprofit clinics exist, but they are regulated and structured very specifically, and they mostly operate within hospital systems or federally qualified health centers (FQHCs). A small, high-touch, cash-and-ESA-friendly telemedicine practice like ours operates most cleanly as a professional S-Corp. The clinical accountability is where it belongs: in the entity that holds the licenses and the malpractice coverage.
2. The nonprofit charitable purpose has to stay the charitable purpose. A 501(c)(3) is granted its tax-exempt status because it operates for one or more specifically enumerated charitable purposes. Vitae Catholica's purpose is educational: authoring, publishing, and distributing Christian health formation material. If we ran the clinical practice through the nonprofit, we would be mixing a clinical service business with an educational charity, and the IRS would have legitimate questions about whether the nonprofit was really operating for its stated purpose or as a back door for the clinical business. Keeping them separate keeps the charitable purpose clean.
3. Donations to the curriculum should not subsidize the clinic. This is the ethical version of reason #2. If a donor writes a check to Vitae Catholica because they want the Quintivium to exist, that money should go toward writing, editing, illustrating, and publishing the Quintivium — not toward paying a clinician's malpractice premium. Conversely, a patient paying for a telemedicine visit with their ESA is paying for a medical service, not making a charitable donation. The two money streams cannot be allowed to blur. Two entities keep them honest.
The right question is not "why are there two entities?" but "what would a single entity have to hide?" We have chosen a legal structure that forces us to be transparent about what money does what.
What this means for patients and readers
For patients, it is simple. You are booking a telemedicine visit with Vitae Health. Vitae Health is a professional practice. It bills like a practice, it carries malpractice coverage like a practice, it holds the state licenses a practice holds. It is also owned and led by the same clinician whose name is on the curriculum, and the clinical voice, the clinical ethics, and the clinical values are the same in both places. When you see Dana at the clinic, you are seeing the same person who wrote the curriculum. The two entities are not hiding separate personnel behind separate masks. They are a legal architecture around a single mission carried by a small family.
For readers of the curriculum and the resource pages — the Theology of the Body page, the Natural Family Planning page, the Quintivium preview material, the essays in this journal — the work is published by Vitae Catholica, Inc. as a charitable educational project. You will not be charged to read it. When the Quintivium books are released, they will be offered at the cost of production, with donor-funded copies free to families who cannot pay. The nonprofit keeps that promise precisely because it does not also have to carry the overhead of a clinical practice.
What this means for the website
One domain, two masthead identities. This is the stylistic decision we have settled on. The website lives at vitaehealth.org — the clinical identity is the dominant public-facing name, because the clinic is the thing most visitors come looking for first. The nonprofit identity — Vitae Catholica, Inc. — appears on every page where it is legally and ethically relevant: in the footer colophon, on the educational resource pages, in the curriculum materials, in the donation page when there is one. We wanted to be clear without being wordy. The footer on every page says the same thing:
Educational projects are published by Vitae Catholica, Inc., an Arizona 501(c)(3) nonprofit. Clinical telemedicine services are provided by Vitae Health, a DBA of Rodriguez Corporation. The two are legally distinct.
That is the whole architecture in one sentence. If you want to know more about the clinical side, visit Christian Telemedicine Services. If you want to know more about the educational side, visit The Quintivium. If you are a donor and you want to support the curriculum work specifically, contact us through the nonprofit. If you are a patient and you want to book a visit, the clinic is open.
Why we wanted to say this on the record
Because transparency is a Christian virtue, and because the alternative — burying this structure in fine print and hoping no one asks — would not serve either entity well. Patients deserve to know which legal entity they are buying a service from. Donors deserve to know which legal entity they are supporting. Readers deserve to know who is publishing what they are reading. We are a small Catholic family business and a small Catholic nonprofit. We are not trying to hide the architecture. We are trying to make it legible.
The separation is not a loophole. It is the feature. It lets the clinic be a clinic and the nonprofit be a nonprofit. It lets each entity specialize in what it is legally good at. It protects donors, patients, and the charitable purpose of the 501(c)(3). And it keeps the mission whole — which is, finally, the only point of any of it.