A Practical Approach Toward a Culture of Catholic Primary Care
July 5, 2025
By James O. Breen, M.D.
How can Catholic physicians avoid getting caught up in the prevailing secularized medical culture, and instead practice in a way that is distinctively “Catholic”? Taking this idea a step further, how might we transform American medicine through the application of the Church’s social teaching to our daily practice? I have pondered these questions often over my twenty-odd years practicing family medicine. My reflections form the basis of “Benedict Medicine: Creating a Culture of Catholic Primary Care”, the plenary lecture I will present on Thursday, September 4th at the Catholic Medical Association’s Annual Educational Conference in Kansas City.
CMA members know that the contemporary medical culture has taken various stances at odds with the traditional Christian worldview. Mainstream specialty associations’ strident support for the abortion license and artificial reproductive technologies, their conferral of legitimacy to falsehoods about the nature of human sexuality, as well as the politicization of scientific discourse, have undermined the authentically Christian origins of Western medicine. Regarding care delivery, the commoditization of medicine into a transactional enterprise, increasingly driven by corporate and regulatory directives that fail to honor the relational interaction between doctor and patient, further erodes the human fabric of the profession. Primary care—and in a particular way family medicine, which encompasses the care of people at all stages of life—is at the forefront of these bioethical battle lines.
How should a Catholic medical professional respond? In this time of upheaval, I propose that we begin by interpreting the Church’s social teaching vis-à-vis our roles as physicians, striving to view our practice of medicine as an invitation to participate in the work of Christ the Divine Physician. Jesus’ commands flow through the Church’s social teachings and animate our professional vocations as his disciples. At this inflection point in the Church, our new pontiff Leo XIV is an echo of the last great Pope named Leo (Leo XIII), whose encyclical Rerum novarum (1891) continues to instruct us in the application of Catholic social doctrine to the challenges of the modern world.
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