By Bridget Spinks
JESUIT Fr Steve Astill SJ will introduce at least two papal documents to the University of Notre Dame Australia’s (UNDA) theology course at Fremantle, succeeding Mgr Kevin Long as the course coordinator.
Fr Astill, also the newly appointed parish priest of East Fremantle’s Immaculate Conception, will introduce Pope Benedict XVI’s 2009 Encyclical Caritas in Veritate (Charity in Truth) on Integral Human Development In Charity And Truth, and Pope John Paul II’s 1984 Apostolic Letter, Salvifici Dolores (Salvific Suffering), On The Christian Meaning of Human Suffering. He will also introduce Patch Adams, a 1998 film starring Robin Williams based on Dr Hunter Doherty “Patch” Adams who had an unconventional approach to medicine.
Mgr Long remains the Rector of St Charles Seminary in Guildford and will continue to teach with Fr Astill at UNDA.
Fr Astill said that students are educated in evidence-based medicine but it was also important to help students to empathise with the person suffering.
“We want human persons as doctors,” he said, adding that he wanted students to reflect on what medicine is really about. “One question for every experienced medical professional is when does the ‘art of medicine’ take over from the science of medicine? The art of medicine means that the doctor is in tune with the particular patient.You need a little heart that beats with love of your patient,” he said.
All UNDA students study theology as part of the university’s liberal arts approach to education.
But when postgraduate students come to study medicine at UNDA, having already studied for four years, they take theology course MED100, specifically designed for graduates who come in highly educated and widely experienced.
Fr Astill said this programme takes a low-key approach that is thematic rather than doctrinal where the aim is not to convert the students but to educate them.
“The aim is to engage them; to come to an understanding of where they’re at. It’s not about their personal lives but their theology education which will equip them to have a conversation with a patient about God when that’s what the patient wants to do,” he said. “We want them to have a working knowledge and understanding of religious and theological differences. We’re educating students to have a dialogue from where they’re at with regard to the subject of God and the Church”.
“I speak as a Catholic priest; yes, human suffering comes the way of every human being including Jesus Christ whose suffering and death on the cross was real,” he said.
Fr Astill said he will also be teaching the students about Swissborn psychiatrist Dr Elizabeth Kübler-Ross’ work on the ‘five stages of grief’ which are denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance – a process dying patients can pass through (not always in that order) in coming to terms with terminal illness. When a person can say he is at peace, he can rest in peace,” Fr Astill said. “When patients are still in that confusing bargaining stage, it’s hard for them to die in peace.”
Fr Astill brings to the position 17 years of life experience gained while living in Nigeria from 1992 to 2009. He was chaplain to the Lagos University Teaching Hospital and the College of Medicine of the University of Lagos for 15 years.
Fr Astill was born in Sydney but grew up in Iran until he was 12 and attended high school with the Marist Brothers in Ashgrove, Brisbane. He entered the novitiate in 1975 in Sydney. After studying at La Trobe University, Melbourne University and Melbourne’s College of Divinity and after completing a one-year ‘tertianship’, Jesuit preparation for final vows, in Detroit, Michigan, he was ordained to the priesthood in Brisbane in 1985. He took final vows in 2006.