Spirituality and the Health-Care Professional

Abstract

The Church and the clinic, theology and medicine, mutually support one another when the good of the other is justly pursued within an organic context of interdependency. In the midst of rapid change in health care, Catholic health-care workers have much to offer the industry as they bring their spirituality of interdependency into their work environments. Due attention to spiritual nourishment received in the Church via the Eucharist is thus encouraged if Catholic health care is to have the leavening impact it is intended to have in culture. After revisiting Pope John Paul II's social encyclical Laborem exercens (On Human Work, 1981), a spirituality of work is offered for Catholic health-care professionals with particular focus on the Eucharist. Accordingly, this essay presents a theology of the Eucharist that shows how Catholics are bound closely together so that the poverty attending loneliness can be lessened and our mutual efforts at enhancing health may be strengthened. The Church and the clinic, theology and medicine, mutually support one another when the good of the other is justly pursued within an organic context of interdependency bolstered by the Eucharist.

Our vocation is unity. Our affliction is to be in a state of duality, and affliction due to an original contamination of pride and of injustice…. Love is thus the right physician for our original illness…. We have lost this unity, we whose religion should be the most incarnate of any. We must recover it.

—Simone Weil