| This Topic assigned to the Catholic Physicians Guild of the Philippines contains three specific conditions:
1. The Medical practice is Catholic;
2. The Community served is economically depressed;
3. The Catholic physician is expected to show by example what it means to be a Catholic healer. The Catholic Medical doctor is one who subscribes to and follows the guidelines of Scripture and Tradition as interpreted by the teaching magisterium of the Roman Catholic Church. Pope John Paul II in his encyclical Veritatis Splendor said: "The advance of science and technology, this splendid witness of the human capacity for understanding and for perseverance, does not dispense humanity from the obligation to ask the ultimate religious questions. Rather it spurs us on to face the most painful and decisive of struggles, those of the heart and of the moral conscience". In an economically depressed community, the doctor has to find ways and means to bring the patient back to health at the least possible expense. Professional fees may be waived. Medicines received as physician's sample may be given the patient. The doctor may undertake political advocacy so that the unemployed may be given some sort of livelihood. He may campaign for health insurance coverage of as many indigent families as feasible. In the Philippines, medical doctors enjoy a relatively great influence not only among government officials, church dignitaries but the community in general and as such can help provide some form of support to people in need not only personally but through other people. More than half a century ago, I asked a learned priest to recommend to me some books that will help me understand the Bible better so that hopefully I can be a better Christian. He said to me:
I can tell you what the bible is in one sentence: The bible is a long, long story of God's unremitting and unconditional love for man and man's sporadic and intermittent response to that love.
If you want to be a better Christian, be the best ophthalmologist you can possibly be, and then in the exercise of your profession, show God's love for every patient that comes your way. God will bless you all the days of your life, for you will have become a Christ for others. Mission of the catholic medical doctor
The Mission of the Catholic Medical Doctor is to be the guardian and servant of human life by bringing to the sick room or the operating table God's outpouring love for the suffering patient as an actualized continuation of the healing love of Christ who went about doing good and healing everyone.
In 1994, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith approved and quickly confirmed in its entirety the Charter for Health Care Workers submitted to it by the Pontifical Council for Pastoral Assistance to Health Care Workers. The Charter gathers its directives around the triple theme of "PROCREATION, LIFE, and DEATH". I commend this document to all Catholic physicians.
The International Federation of Catholic Medical Association (FIAMC) and the Pontifical Council of the Pastoral for Health Care Workers came up with the following recommendations and guidelines to help Catholic doctors make correct medical decisions:
1. Give the patient the best care our individual capacities will allow by continually improving our professional abilities;
2. Respect our patients as human persons putting their interests ahead of economic considerations, and treat them without prejudice arising from religious, racial, ethnic, socio-economic or sexual differences;
3. Protect and defend human life from conception to its natural end, believing that human life, transmitted by parents, is created by God and has an eternal destiny that belongs to Him;
4. Refuse to become an instrument of violent or oppressive application of medicine;
5. Serve the public health policies respectful of life and of the dignity and nature of the human person;
6. Cooperate with the application of just laws except on grounds of conscientious objection when the civil law does not respect human rights especially the right to life;
7. Work with openness towards every person, independently of their religious beliefs;
8. Finally, donate part of your time for free and charitable care of the poor. Recent advances in science and technology have introduced ethical questions about practices in the following categories:
1. Procreation
2. Contraception
3. Genetic manipulation
4. Abortion
5. Death and Dying
Times constraints do not allow me to deal in detail with all these topics. So let me just share with you the principles involved according to the teachings of the magisterium. Procreation
The dignity of the human person demands that it come into being as a gift of God and as a fruit of the conjugal act, which is proper and specific to the unitive and procreative love between the spouses, an act which of its very nature is irreplaceable.
Every means and medical intervention, in the field of procreation, must always be by way of assistance and never substitution of the marriage act.
The use of artificial means merely to facilitate the natural act, or to ensure that a normally performed act reaches its proper end as in homologous artificial insemination that is, within matrimony with semen of the partner when it is obtained through a normal marriage act is considered assistance and not substitution of the marriage act and is therefore licit.
On the other hand fertilization in vitro with embryo transfer is illicit because conception is not the result of a conjugal act but outside it through techniques which determine the conditions and decide the effect. In this case the child is not born as a gift of love but as a laboratory product. Here the competence and technical activity of third parties determine the success of the intervention, hence, technology is given dominion over the origin and destiny of the human person.
The desire for a child gives no right to have a child. This latter is a person who has the right to be conceived only with full respect of its personhood, and to be the fruit of the specific act of the conjugal love of his parents, and the right to be respected as a person from the moment of his conception until his return to God who is his source.
Medicine directed to the integral good of the person cannot prescind, or be separated from the ethical principles governing human procreation. Contraception
John Paul II emphasizes that it is God's will that the conjugal act must always be open to its unitive and procreative ends. Man is not free to dissociate these ends. However, nowadays we have the unitive without the procreative in contraception and the procreative without the unitive in cloning. Recourse to artificial contraceptive practice is illicit. In the Divine Plan, procreation is linked not only to the biological but also the spiritual union of the parents, united in the bond of matrimony. In evaluating behavior with regard to birth control, the moral judgement "does not depend solely on good intentions and on the evaluation of the motives. It is determined by objective criteria; criteria drawn from the dignity of the human person and human action.
The inner structure of the marriage act is such that, while it profoundly unites the partners, it fits them for the generation of new life, according to laws inscribed in the very being of the man and the woman. Love which uses "body language" to express itself is at once unitive and procreative; it clearly implies both spousal and parental significance". To have the unitive but preventing the procreative is against the law of God.
A human being is meant to love and be loved. One cannot give what one does not have and one cannot have what was not first given to him. In the divine plan, the child born within the family is best assured of receiving parental love. Having been nurtured in that love, the child now becomes capable of giving love to others.
Life is but an opportunity to accept or reject God's invitation to live with Him forever as His adopted child. To accept His offer is to love Him with all our heart, and with all our soul and with all our mind, and to love our fellow human beings as Christ has loved us. Genetic manipulation
The ever-widening knowledge of the human genetic patrimony(genome), the individuation and mapping of the activity of the genes, with the possibility of transferring them, modifying them, or substituting them, opens up untold prospects to medicine and at the same time creates new and delicate ethical problems.
In moral evaluation, a distinction must be made between strictly therapeutic manipulation, which aims to cure illnesses caused by genetic or chromosome anomalies (genetic therapy), from intervention altering the human genetic patrimony. A curative intervention, which is called "genetic surgery", will be considered desirable in principle, provided its purpose is the real promotion of the personal well-being of the individual, without damaging his integrity or worsening his condition of life.
On the other hand, interventions which are not directly curative, the purpose of which is "the production of a human being selected according to sex or other predetermined qualities," which change the genotype of the individual and of the human species, "are contrary to the personal dignity of the human being, to his integrity and to his identity". Therefore they can be in no way justified on the pretext that they will produce some beneficial results for humanity in the future. Abortion
"From the time that the ovum is fertilized, a life is begun that is neither that of the farther nor of the mother, it is rather the life of a new human being with its own growth. It would never be made human if it were not human already. Right from the fertilization the adventure of a new life begins, and each of its capacities require time- a rather lengthy time-to find its place and to be in a position to act."
The birth of a child is an important and significant stage on the development began at conception. It is not a "leap" in quality or a new beginning, but a stage, with no break in continuity, of the same process. Childbirth is the passage from maternal gestation to physiological autonomy of life.
If the life of a child is at serious risk, physicians should see to the child's baptism according to the conditions provided by the Church. If an ordinary minister of the sacrament is not available a priest or a deacon- the Catholic physician has the faculty to confer it. Death and dying
The human person created in the image of God, is a being at once corporeal and spiritual. The unity of soul and body is so profound that one has to consider the soul to be the "form" of the body: i.e., it is because of its spiritual soul that the body made of matter becomes a human living body; spirit and matter, in man, are not two natures united, but rather their union forms a single nature. The moral law, in which the biological meanings take shape," cannot be seen as a merely biological norm" but as integrally human: in it is expressed "the rational order according to which the human person is called by the Creator to direct and regulate his life and his actions and in particular, to use and dispose of his own body".
Life is indisposable and inviolable because it is the property and gift of God the Creator and Father. The human being is not master of his own life: he receives it in order to use it; he is not the proprietor but the administrator, because God alone is the Lord of life".
The Divine lordship of life is the foundation and guarantor of the right of life, which is not, however, a power over life. Rather, it is the right to live with human dignity, as well as being guaranteed and protected in this fundamental, primal and unsuppressible good which is the root and condition of every good-right of the person.
Life belongs to God and no man can end that life. Suicide and euthanasia are sins against God and are never allowed. Comfort and nutritional support are demanded of the Health Care Worker. Pain killers given for the comfort of the patient which may secondarily shorten the life of the patient may be justified by the proportionate relief from intense pain.
Whenever the patient's illness puts him in danger of death, it is the obligation of the physician to advise him in the most practical and least painful way of such possibility, so that the patient can make all the necessary preparations for his temporal and spiritual needs. Temporal death is the separation of the soul from the body. The body returns to "just from which it came" but the soul lives on eternally. Aware of our human weaknesses and limitations, many may find these demands of our profession in sustaining Catholic values in a highly competitive world quite onerous. However, let us remember the words of Jesus: "I am the vine, you are the branches. He who abides in Me and I in Him, bears much fruit:
For without me you can do nothing..
If you abide in Me and My words abide in you.
You will ask what you desire and it shall be done for you.
You did not choose Me, but I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit and that your fruit should remain, that whatever you ask the Father in my name, He may give you". And so, for all of us, I pray:
Lord Jesus, make each one of us an instrument of your merciful love.
Enlighten our minds, guide our hands, make our hearts diligent and compassionate and finally, make us see divine face in every patient who may come to us. Eternal Father, grant to us, that at the end of our earthly pilgrimage, we may contemplate your glorious countenance and experience the joy of the encounter with you in your kingdom of joy and everlasting peace.
All these we ask in the name of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ who lives and reigns with you in the unity of Holy Spirit one God forever and ever.
Amen. |
