| Abstract
Some Hospitaller saints with faith, vision and practice can guide enlighten doctors and other health professionals to reframe their identity and mission according to deeper dimensions of coherence, courage and prophecy.
These Hospitallers can be an inspiration for us to live with spiritual density; to be Catholics and to fulfill a mission with competence and respect for the dignity of human life. In a word, to give doctors energy and holistic quality.
A charismatic transformation called conversion made these saints men and women outstanding models of hospitality with
• Deep faith, convictions and coherence
• assertive and enriched identity
• prophetic action in favor of the all needy, the weak and the sick
• critical conscience on the ethical deviations on the issue of life promotion and defense inside and outside the Church
• social commitment to their brothers mainly the excluded by the disease and poverty;
• strong and purposeful self-awareness of fulfilling an open mission in favor of people inside of a set of permanent and universal values;
• Capacity to irradiate to others their conviction and action;
This identity and mission made them counterbalancing ethical yeast to their time as doctors and other health professionals are called to be today.
The authors will reflect on these principles as a must to doctors' identity and mission. 1. Introduction
The saints we consider are many and lived in different times and had different life styles. We want to limit our reflection to some we know better and to general references.
St. John of God, St. Camil de Lellis, patrons of the hospitals, nurses and patients, as St. John Grande, St. Ricardo Pampuri a doctor living in the first half of the twentieth century, St. Benedict Menni, Mother Theresa of Calcutta and the still living Jean Vanier are some of them. But many others are examples, models and inspiration for the doctors and other health professionals to rethink and renew their Christian and professional identity and mission.
They are men who marked their times for their faith and ethically integrated and coherent life. Their doing sprang from their being according the philosophical saying agere sequitur esse (acting follows being). Being comes first or at the same time as doing. Similarly we could say Christian faith profession and practice must be followed by an according health practice profession.
Identity disintegration and lack of ethical commitment in health professionals are a loss. To profess, to be a professional used to mean to be committed and coherent with a mission. They go a strong step further the Hippocratic Oath which expresses some of human life values.
The main characteristics and dimensions in Hospitaller saints with their being and mission harmonized by their conversion.
1. Deep faith, conviction, coherence and ethical integrity
2. Social assertiveness in changing society establishment and status quo, not as violent revolutionaries but with steadily courageous and charitable action.
3. Prophetic action and witness in favor of the needy, the weak the miserable and the sick
4. Being critical consciences on all ethically deviations about human life. They were promoting and defending excluded and defenseless people life.
5. Against all sorts of pressures they accepted to fulfill a unique mission committed to them inside of a set of permanent and universal values, such as, human life sacredness and equal dignity of all and each person.
These characteristics are a must to health professionals of today. They can refresh their spiritual and ethical identity and the quality of their mission, as promoters and advocates of human life culture from conception to birth. Health professionals may become in more decisive way yeast to transform health services. We will indicate some principles and guidelines according to these models. 2. Some principles and guidelines
We suggest some principles and guidelines to achieve these goals. 2.1. Coherence between Christian faith and personal ethical integrity practice
In our inspiration models we find always coherent people and people of efficient action congruent with their convictions.
Professional competence although necessary is not enough to make a good health professional. The risk is to become a divided person: technically competent but motivated by vested interests or by his career or money and not by human values of public good, generosity and real love to the patients. A living faith makes a difference.
Discrimination against the poor and sick people, and an orientation to the upper classes of patients is not acceptable for a health professional and even less for a catholic doctor.
Our models related extensively and intensively with all kinds of needy and sick people. Most of them made intentional choice for the more excluded and the poorest being charitable and justice bridges between rich and poor people.
With their coherence, integrity and action they still claim that everyone however poor, limited or ill, is a worth person, with equal dignity and value.
Professionals who follow their example are called today to counterbalance a culture of exclusion and discrimination as if life and our world be only for those who can pay, who are rich, admired in stages, stadiums, pictures and in executive bodies of big companies. 2.2. Assertive witness to change an established culture in health work.
Today professionals are subject to the temptation of forgetting Hipocrates oath and life values and to conform with money, consumerism and death culture.
Medicine instead of a mission to the patients risks becoming an inhumane business. To visit, treat or care poor and incurable patients' risks to be felt as a waist of time and power and a hindrance for one's ambitions. I quote John Paul II statement: "all of us are called to care the whole life and everybody's life" (Evangelium Vitae 87).
Advanced techniques, even if necessary in health care, may have an ambiguous use: saving lives or making relationships more and more distant, cold or inexistent. In death's culture patients and families feel alone, forgotten and sometimes abandoned to their fate as pieces of a machine. Some professionals dare to visit patients without even trying a word and rejecting an hand shaking when they deal with anonymous mental patients.
The models we are reflecting upon maintained always their proximity and warmfulness to their patients they called their brothers, sisters, lords and children of God. They listen, talk, touch and wash them affectionately making them feel at home, important and participative subjects.
We can wonder if Mother Theresa's life cannot tell a lot more about quality relationship with sick poor people than many experts' talks, where respect and love are absent. 2.3. Prophetic pioneers in promoting, healing and caring
This leads us to the principle of promoting, treating and caring all the needy and the sick either in emergency or long term situations.
Our hospitaller saints' actions are sometimes criticized by social scientists in base to today's development theories, as dealing exclusively with misery, sickness and poverty effects and not with causes and factors, as if they were a sort of firemen extinguishing fires without preventing them.
Studding their action we discover this is not so. They are examples of concern in promoting and defending human life from conception to death. They met poor and sick people needs through the whole span of one's life until death and even post-mortem with respectful obsequies for the dead and their families. They can be an example for health professionals to protect and help pregnant mothers; to find resources to rear new born accepted and rejected babies; to feed and educate growing children. They very often looked for adoptive families and institutions for them. They warmly accepted old and sick people, alleviating their suffering and caring them in illness until their last moments of life.
With fewer resources they fed the hungry and cloth the nude as a means to promote life and health. Today with much more knowledge and resources, children and sick die everyday with hunger and lack of medicines. And unfortunately only a limited number of doctors and other health professionals seem concerned with so big assimetries in the world. The most concerned with these terrible situations follow the Hospitaller saints and very often are Christians. 2.4. Critical consciences and promoters of life counterculture opposed to death culture
Catholic doctors if they accept their mission of being the light and salt of the world they have to be more engaged in life and health promotion and diseases prevention activities. They have to involve themselves in citizen's advocacy in all health and life matters.
Some are so little concerned with primarily prevention that their practice risks conveying a simplistic idea of being more interested on diseases that on prevention and health education.
Some health professionals recognize that unfortunately they where educated to treat and cure diseases more than to prevent them or to care and be near incurable patients. We hope things are changing.
They know the iatrogenic principle and their effects but they do not invest in people education to have healthy life styles based on life and health as a gift and as a daily personal responsibility for their clients and patients.
They deal sometimes with people as if they were irresponsible persons for themselves and for the others. They repeat Adam and Eve excuses. What have I to do with my brother? 2.5. Awareness and commitment with healing Christian mission
To be a Christian health professional is more than to be a professional. To accept a mission linked with a profession means to be a committed Christian in health care and healing attitudes and action. Committed in first place to Christ and his project of abundant life for everybody and a Kingdom where the little ones are the first and irreplaceable.
Hospitaller saints even without using the expression practiced holistic treatment and care. No human dimensions were left out by their action.
They exercised health care and a healing approach. They integrated in their helping action attitudes of pardon and love to the needy and the sick and motivated them to accept God's pardon and to be spiritually healed with prayer and pardon given to others and to themselves.
Professional mission demands proximity, love and charity. Christian community values go much further than the WHO model of health as biopsychosocial and cultural wellbeing. Spiritual dimension with forgiveness, deep reconciliation and peace (shalom) are important dimensions for Christian professionals to commit themselves with in health care to heal those they care for. To care and treat is to practice the WHO approach more a healing process. 2.6. Apostolic Irradiation to move other professionals
And finally we add an important point. Conviction with action to promote life tends to irradiate and motivate other health professionals to cooperate in the same direction.
A generous service mission will irradiate and multiply apostles to serve human life.
As happened with all our hospitaller models, the touchstone of Christian health professionals committed to life values will make them promoters of others' generosity, to work in services and movements as volunteers and in health pastoral work. Conclusions
The practical lesson and example of Hospitaller saints for health professionals' identity and mission can be summarized in these points:
- coherence between life, faith and health care
- assertiveness and courage to change death culture spreading around
- concern in promoting and defending human life through its whole span from conception to death and afterwards
- mission as critical and ethical consciences in favor of life counterculture
- Commitment with an authentic Christian healing mission, his values of love, prayer, pardon and reconciliation.
If we do so God and our patrons will bless us with cure and healing gifts. |
