December 8, 2025

Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ, Members and Friends of the Catholic Medical Association (USA),

As my term as President of our beloved Catholic Medical Association comes to its appointed end, I write to you with a heart filled with gratitude, humility, and profound joy for the privilege of having served alongside you for the past two years.

Together we have stood firm as joyful, faithful witnesses to the Gospel of Life in an age that desperately needs the healing presence of Christ the Divine Physician. We have defended the sanctity of every human life from conception to natural death; we have upheld the truth about marriage, family, and human sexuality; we have accompanied suffering patients and weary colleagues with compassion rooted in charity; and we have formed new generations of Catholic physicians, residents, and students who burn with zeal to bring the light of Christ into examination rooms, operating theaters, classrooms, and legislative halls.

None of this would have been possible without your daily fidelity, your generous sacrifices, your courageous voices, and your unwavering trust in Divine Providence. You have been for me a living icon of the communion of saints—doctors, nurses, chaplains, spouses, seminarians, and lay faithful—all laboring together in the vineyard of the Lord.

I am deeply grateful to our dedicated national and guild leadership, to our tireless staff, to our bishops and priest-chaplains, who have shepherded us with wisdom and fatherly care, and especially to our Blessed Mother, Mary, Seat of Wisdom and Mother of the Divine Physician, under whose mantle we have placed this Association from its very beginning.

As I hand over this office to Dr. Hilger, I do so with complete confidence in the Holy Spirit who has guided the CMA for more than ninety years and who will continue to guide it until Our Lord returns in glory. May we never grow weary of proclaiming in word and deed that medicine practiced in fidelity to the Magisterium is a true path of holiness and a powerful instrument of the New Evangelization.

Please keep me in your prayers, as you will ever remain in mine. Let us continue to walk together, encouraging one another, until that day when we behold face-to-face the One who is the Resurrection and the Life.

With deepest affection in the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Immaculate Heart of Mary,

Michelle K. Stanford, MD

President