Doctors in Life and Death
New York, Nov. 1995: to the National Federation of Catholic Physicians of the U.S., on the ocasion of the Thomas Linacre Award (published in Osservatore Romano, Dec 1995)
Along with my gratitude, may I express my deep sense of being honored as the 1994 recipient of the Linacre award. It is encouraging to know that my periodic writings on questions of sexual and matrimonial ethics have been found useful. Being a fairly frequent contributor to the Quarterly has in some way almost made me feel part of your association, so much so that you have been often in my prayers. Today, along with my gratitude, I promise you that you will continue there, for it is my deep belief that the medical profession is faced with a very special challenge and has a very particular mission in this world of ours. It is this belief which inspires the few remarks I address to you today.
On the occasion of the World Year of the Family, the Pope wrote his "Letter to Families" - which deserves to be read and re-read. He expressed in it his deep concern that the family is losing its human and humanizing character; he went on to insist that only when the great values of the family - generous self-giving, care and solidarity, - are recovered, can "the building of the civilization of love", a truly human civilization, be ensured. Caring for one another, as people do in a true family, is the constant call of the Pope. Speaking to the United Nations here in New York just a month ago, it was to the concept of mankind as a "family of nations" that he appealed, as the basis from which a new "ethic of solidarity" can and must be built in the world.
In God's plan, the family is the first school of humanity; it is in the family where young people learn to treat each other humanly, where their spirits and outlooks are humanized. If family life and spirit are weakening today, if a family spirit is being lost, the world is becoming less human.
A mother, a father has that humanizing power, treating their children with affection. But the process by which society itself can recover its human spirit is not limited just to the family. Others besides fathers and mothers have a special humanizing power. A priest has it - he should have it - toward his people. And so a teacher toward his or her students. And in a very singular way a doctor has it, not just towards the families he or she may treat, but toward all of his or her patients. In the work of re-humanizing the world, you physicians have a most particular role to play.
My father was a doctor, a good one and much loved by his patients. Even more than by his medicine, he did them good by his affection. Today people don't often find themselves treated with affection. It is very hard to live a happy life - and even harder to end it happily - when one has never been treated with true kindness. People do not just want efficiency, service or hygienic conditions. They want humanity. The medical profession offers unique opportunities for expressing humanity, for communicating it, and in a real sense for saving it.
You are not engineers or technicians of man. You are physicians. Your area of concern is man as a whole, in the whole of his "physis" or nature. You must know that nature, remembering that the person is more than the body, and that you can do good not just to the body but to the whole person. In many cases, in the last moments of an earthly existence - when this life closes and an infinite perspective of light and goodness and mercy is about to placed before someone who perhaps feels everything is ending in darkness - it may be you who can most reach the soul, the central nucleus of the person, and help it turn to the light. It depends on your faith, but also on your humanity.
It is when a person is ill or in pain that he or she feels most the need of help. In the hands of the doctor a patient most realizes how he or she is being treated: as an object - simply as just one more specimen of diseased humanity, or as just one more source of revenue; or rather as a person, as someone of such unique worth that he or she cannot be bought for money, but can only be ransomed by the Blood of the Son of God.
A doctor is never a good doctor unless he can bring that special touch which is like a mother's touch, or a priest's touch, for it always has in it so much of divine consolation: so much of the touch of Christ who was always moved by each sufferer, and who never tired of laying his hands on each one. Over the centuries the good physician has been characterized not just by the professional touch, but by the human touch. Do not lose that touch; that human touch which has a divine efficacy because it is so like the touch of Christ.
It has been said that the doctor's special work of preserving or restoring health is dogged by the sense of inevitable ultimate failure: all his or her patients are going to die in the end. You cannot yield to that sense, and above all you cannot let your patients yield to it - that death is a definitive failure. Death is the gateway to the decisive triumph, to eternal life.
In these days of euthanasia, many people are tempted to pass judgment on the lives of others or on their own: he or she - or I - would be better dead. It is despair of life which leads to despair in death. We cannot despair of life, nor of death. We hold to our faith that the world, and the life of each single person, is in the hands of a God who is not only all-loving but also all-wise and all-powerful. A God therefore who is able and determined to bring good out of evil; even more, as Blessed Josemaría Escrivá used to say, to bring great good out of great evil. We cannot despair of life; nor can we despair at or in death.
"Better dead"...? So St. Paul thought when he said "for me to die is gain" (Phil 1:21); but that did not make him cease to spend his life serving the Lord and people. Better dead? We not only agree, but maintain in firm faith that if we accept death at the moment and in the way God sends it, all of us will be better dead, far better, for then we will really begin to live. We cannot anticipate death; but we can help people anticipate - in their hearts and in their hope - what lies beyond death: God's mercy and forgiveness and with that, the entrance into his eternal joy.
May God bless each and everyone of you in your work; and keep keenly alive in your minds and hearts the good that can constantly be done through it.