CNS STORY: Fight secular trends, base ministry on love, health care leaders urged

CHA-OPEN Jun-8-2009 (940 words) xxxn

Fight secular trends, base ministry on love, health care leaders urged

By Nancy Frazier O'Brien
Catholic News Service

NEW ORLEANS (CNS) -- A Franciscan physician and ethicist warned Catholic health care leaders June 7 not to let their ministry become an entirely secular operation that sees patients as customers and leaves out the vital component of love.

Brother Daniel P. Sulmasy recounted his experiences with an unfeeling bureaucracy one evening at his own hospital, St. Vincent's in New York. He contrasted it with the approach of a nurse at a local secular hospital whose care of patients mirrors more closely the love that saints, heroes and founders of Catholic health care brought to their work.

"Perhaps we can ask ourselves why Mother Teresa went to Calcutta," he said. "I think we all know that it wasn't for the outcomes."

Brother Sulmasy spoke on the opening day of the annual assembly of the Catholic Health Association, which brought almost 800 leaders in Catholic health care to New Orleans June 7-9. A medical doctor who also holds a doctorate in philosophy, he is to become a professor of medicine and medical ethics in the divinity and medical schools of the University of Chicago July 1.

He titled his keynote talk to the CHA assembly "Gospel-Centered Health Care Is a Radical Approach in Today's Secular World."

"We are frequently guilty, I think, of turning the Catholicity of our hospitals into a series of moral codes," Brother Sulmasy said. "We seem to 'fit in' better in a secular society when we talk about morality. More conservative institutions will boast of a code which lists the things they will not do. More liberal institutions will boast of a code of social justice. The most Catholic institutions among us will boast of both.

"But none of these codes can serve as replacements for the ever-new and ever-renewing encounter with the person who is love," he added. "That encounter must be the foundation of our health care systems and our institutions."

Brother Sulmasy said the message about love in the 13th chapter of Paul's First Letter to the Corinthians -- "Love is patient, love is kind ..." -- has been "turned into a bit of wedding kitsch" but offers today's society words that are "radical, dangerous and countercultural."

"What Paul is saying, if you can hear it, is that you may have crucifixes in every patient's room; you may not have a single employee who would ever even think of performing an abortion; you may have excellent services for the poor and the undocumented; but if you do not have love, you are nothing," Brother Sulmasy said. "You are zero. Zippo. Nada."

He acknowledged that some might find his words "vague, pious, abstract and irrelevant to the work we must undertake -- which is not only assuring the survival of Catholic health care, but providing for its flourishing in the 21st century."

"But if what I have been saying is irrelevant at best, or a distracting fairy tale at worst, then the Gospel itself is either irrelevant or a fairy tale," he said. "And we might as well all go home, dissolve this organization and merge with the American Hospital Association."

Brother Sulmasy said the current tough economic times are "exactly the time in which we must return to fundamentals."

"We must return to a conception of the whole health care project as an enterprise based squarely upon love," he added. "If we do not, whatever else we might be doing, we will not be doing Catholic health care."

The opening day of the CHA assembly also featured a talk by Nancy G. Brinker, who founded Susan G. Komen for the Cure after she promised her sister, who died of breast cancer at age 36, that she would do everything she could to find a cure for the disease.

"That promise between two sisters became the passion of my life," she said. "And it turned out that the promise I made to Suzy was not my gift to her -- it was her gift to me."

Brinker, who also served as ambassador to Hungary and U.S. chief of protocol under President George W. Bush, said the organization she founded is now "the largest private funder of breast cancer research in the world" and the five-year survival rate for patients whose cancer has not spread from the breast has increased from 74 percent to 98 percent.

"We have overcome the culture of shame and the culture of fear" that once surrounded breast cancer, she said. "But we must not allow them to be replaced by a culture of complacency."

Much remains to be done to improve survival rates for racial and ethnic minority women in the U.S. and for women around the world.

Brinker said Susan G. Komen for the Cure has begun working in Ghana. "But to reach even more people across the continent, we need the help of the Catholic charities, Catholic hospitals, Catholic religious orders and Catholic missionary groups who know the hearts and souls of these communities," she said.

Brinker, who is Jewish, said one of the greatest thrills of her life was welcoming Pope Benedict XVI on his U.S. visit when she was serving as chief of protocol. After her talk she showed what she called "home movies" of her encounters with the pope.

"I felt so close to the Holy Father -- so inspired by his goodness, his message of love and his teaching that human life is sacred and that 'each of us is willed, each of us is loved and each of us is necessary,'" she said in her talk. "That same belief in the dignity and necessity of human life is what inspires my efforts to save lives through Susan G. Komen for the Cure."

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