of the
Pontifical Council for Pastoral Assistance to Health Care Workers
Your Mission: To Serve Health
and Life
9 March 1998
Address given in Italian.
1.I am pleased with this meeting which takes place during the fourth plenary
assembly of the
Pontifical
Council for Pastoral Assistance to Health Care Workers. I greet your President,
Archbishop Javier Lozano Barragán, and thank him for
his cordial words expressing, together with the sentiments of affection you
share, the vitality and commitment of your young dicastery.
I also greet you all, dear members, officials
and consultors of the Pontifical Council who are
attending this Audience. Through you my greeting is extended with grateful
appreciation to all the priests, religious, doctors, scientists, researchers
and those who, with their human and ecclesial sensitivity, and according to
their respective specialties, are involved in the complex world of health.
You intend to discuss demanding topics during
these days of study, in which you will attentively examine the problems and
challenges that the vast field of health care raises for the pastoral care of
health.
2. These first 13 years of activity have
witnessed the dicastery’s zealous and dynamic
commitment in a sensitive, frequently troubled area, and have confirmed the
urgent need for the ecclesial service it carries out. I look with gratitude at
the many things it has been possible to achieve because of your constant
concern to support the admirable, sometimes heroic, willingness of doctors,
sisters and chaplains to serve the sick. The health care apostolate, born of
the Church’s charity and eminently witnessed to by many saints, among whom St.
John of God and St. Camillus de Lellis are
outstanding, flourished extraordinarily over the centuries due to the activity
of the religious orders and institutes dedicated to serving the sick. Today it
is coordinated and promoted by the institution to which, in various ways, you
belong. I myself created it in 1985, entrusting it to the enterprise of
Cardinal Fiorenzo Angelini,
whose intense activity I again wish to recall with appreciation and gratitude.
3. In receiving and continuing this precious
legacy, you have taken charge, with a sense of responsibility and love, of the
tasks which the document creating this dicastery
assigned to it. You therefore carefully follow the difficult problems of health
care, helping those who dedicate themselves to the service of the sick and
suffering, so that their work may ever more closely meet the emerging needs in
this delicate area. You are particularly concerned to collaborate with the
local Churches to ensure that health care workers are provided with appropriate
spiritual assistance as well as with the opportunity to acquire a thorough knowledge
of the Church’s teaching on the moral aspects of illness and the meaning of
human pain. Your dicastery is also attentively
following the theoretical and practical problems of medicine, as well as
legislative developments in the area of health care law, with the intention of
safeguarding respect for the dignity of the person in every situation.
Unfortunately the beneficial action of
protecting and defending health not only encounters obstacles in the many
pathogenic factors, both old and new, which threaten life on earth, but
sometimes also in the mentality and conduct of individuals. Oppression,
violence, war, drugs, kidnapping, the marginalization of immigrants, abortion
and euthanasia are all threats to life that result from human initiative. The totalitarian
ideologies that have degraded man by making him an object, trampling upon or
evading basic human rights, find a worrying counterpart in certain
exploitations of biotechnology that manipulate life in the name of an
inordinate ambition for domination which distorts aspirations and hopes and
increases anxiety and suffering.
4. "I came that they may have life, and
have it abundantly" (Jn 10:10): the Church,
which preserves and spreads the message of salvation, takes Jesus’ vivid and
inspiring affirmation as her programme. Defending
human health, which is your programme, reflects this
mission.
The concept
of health cannot be limited to the mere absence of illness or of temporary
organic dysfunctions. Health involves the well-being of the whole person, his
biophysical, psychological and spiritual state. Therefore, in some way it also
embraces his adaptation to the environment in which he lives and works.
"I came that they may have life, and have
it abundantly" (Jn 10:10). The objectives you
pursue—such as the defence of the person’s dignity in
his physical and spiritual life; the promotion of study and research in the
field of health care; the encouragement of adequate health-care policies; the
guidance of hospital ministry—are the reflection on an operative level of the
task which Jesus transmitted to his Church: to serve life! I can only urge you
to fulfil this duty.
5. The Incarnation of the Word healed all our
weaknesses and ennobled human nature, raising it to supernatural dignity and
making the people of Redemption one body and one mind through the action of the
Holy Spirit. Precisely for this reason, every act of helping the sick, whether
in the fore-most health-care structures or in the simple structures of
developing countries, if done with a spirit of faith and fraternal sensitivity,
becomes in a very real sense a religious act.
Care of the
sick, if carried out in a context of respect for the person, is not limited to
medical treatment or surgery, but aims at healing the whole man, restoring his
interior harmony, the zest for life, the joy of love and communion.
This is also the aim of your dicastery’s activities in the complex and varied world of
holiness, and in collaboration with similar pastoral centres
of the local Churches, which co-ordinate the service of the chaplains and
nursing sisters with the generous service of volunteer workers. The common goal
is respect for the life of every individual who, even if functionally or
organically impaired, preserves, whole and entire the human dignity that is
his.
6. I keenly hope that in your work over the
next few days, you will succeed in formulating appropriate practical
guidelines. This is the way to achieve the original goals of the Pontifical
Council, which will not fail to play its own particular role in the period of
preparation for the Great Jubilee of the Year 2000. You will thus help the
faithful to become aware that "in suffering there is concealed a
particular power that draws a person interiorly close to Christ"
(Apostolic Letter Salvifici Doloris, n.
26). Human suffering, thus transformed into the mystery of the Redeemer’s
suffering, becomes "the irreplaceable mediator and author of the good
things which are indispensable for the world’s salvation" (ibid., no. 27).
Continue to offer your expert service to the
national Episcopal Conferences and all the organizations involved in the
health-care ministry, and the Holy Spirit, who "by his own power and by
the interior union of the members... produces and stimulates love among the faithful"
(Dogmatic Constitution Lumen Gentium, no. 7), will continue to show himself to the
Church at the beginning of the third millennium as "the principal agent of
the new evangelization" (Apostolic Letter Tertio Millennio Adveniente,
no. 45).
As I
entrust these wishes to the Blessed Virgin, who after the Annunciation of the
angel expressed her immediate willingness to serve life for her cousin
Elizabeth, who was soon to give birth, I cordially impart my affectionate
Blessing to you and willingly extend it to those who work with you to make the
service to persons tried by illness ever more effective and human.