By Archbishop Timothy Costelloe SDB
There are many things to be both grateful for and proud of in our Archdiocese. Without doubt, one of them is the extraordinary presence of the Church in the provision of health care. The range of services, agencies and institutions which work in this field in the name of the Church, and more importantly the flesh and blood people who are the face of the Church’s presence in health care in our Archdiocese, are celebrated in this edition of The Record Magazine.
In this Year of Mercy, it is very appropriate that we focus on those who, in a very real sense, are the face, and hands, and voice, and heart, of Christ’s mercy among us. Pope Francis has insisted often that Jesus Christ is the face of the Father’s mercy. But of course, for this to be real and effective in people’s day-to-day lives, it is the Church, through the commitment of its faith-filled people, which makes the merciful Christ present.
One of the most-widely used phrases of Pope Francis is one which he included in an interview he gave not long after his election as Pope. When asked about the role of the Church, he said this:
I see the Church as a field hospital after battle. It is useless to ask a seriously injured person if he has high cholesterol and about the level of his blood sugars! You have to heal his wounds. Then we can talk about everything else. Heal the wounds, heal the wounds. … And you have to start from the ground up.
The Pope was not, of course, speaking exclusively or even primarily of the Church’s involvement in health care in making these remarks. Rather he was using the image of health care to recall the Church to its own fundamental vocation: to be a healer of people’s wounds in imitation of the one whose own life and ministry was so marked by his care for the sick and the suffering. In this sense, those who minister to the sick become a kind of “sacrament”, a living and powerful sign of something that should be at the heart of every Christian’s approach to life: the quality of compassion.
The parable of the Good Samaritan, so shocking to those who first heard it and so challenging and confronting for us who hear it today, captures this essential dimension of the Christian vocation well. For those who do not remember the parable well, it can be found in Saint Luke’s Gospel, chapter 10, verses 25-37. At the heart of this parable are the words, “he (the Samaritan traveller) was moved with compassion”. With these words, Jesus reminds us that it is not just what we do but why we do what we do which really matters. It is the attitude of mind and heart which we bring to all our encounters with others which makes us true disciples of Jesus. This is exactly what Saint Paul is calling us to when he says to us, in the letter to the Philippians, that we must have in us “the same mind that was in Christ Jesus” (Phil 2:5).
This, more than anything else, is what characterises, and must characterise more and more, all those people, institutions and agencies, which in the name of Christ’s Church, work in the field of Catholic health care. With Christ as their model, their inspiration and the source of their strength, they will indeed heal the wounds of their brothers and sisters, whether those wounds be physical, psychological or spiritual – for in the end it is not simply medical conditions, or pathologies, or diseases, which we are called to heal, but people, daughters and sons of God, made in the divine image, and worthy of the highest respect.
With those among us who work in health care as our inspiration, may we all, like the Good Samaritan, be “moved with compassion”.
From page 3 and 4 from Issue 4: ‘Health’ of The Record Magazine