Agenda for the strong at heart

Health Progress, Jul/Aug 2002 by Place, Michael D

SPECIAL SECTION 275 celebration

Facing the Challenges Ahead Will Require Recommitment to our Right to Serve in a Manner Faithful to our Identity

This article is a companion piece to my standard "Reflections" column, which appears on p. 6 of this issue of Health Progress. Whereas that column reflects on some aspects of our 275-year history as a healing ministry, this article engages some of the challenges we are currently encountering and will likely continue to experience over the next years. Those challenges will be considered in light of three concepts: social good, ecclesial ministry, and public actor.

SOCIAL GOOD

One of the more significant items found in the archives of the New Orleans Ursuline community is a letter from President Thomas Jefferson to Sr. Therese de St. Xavier Farjon, Superior, dated May 15, 1804. After the Louisiana Purchase the previous year, the Ursuline community had written the president; its members were concerned whether they would be able to continue their service after the treaty made New Orleans no longer part of a Catholic country. The president's reply remains one of the most significant commentaries on the role of religion in the still young country.

I have received, holy sisters, the letter you have written me wherein you express anxiety for the property vested in your institution by the former governments of Louisiana. The principles of the constitution and government of the United States are a sure guarantee to you that it will be preserved to you sacred and inviolate, and that your institution will be permitted to govern itself according to its own voluntary rules, without interference from the civil authority. Whatever diversity or shade may appear in the religious opinions of our fellow citizens, the charitable objects of your institution cannot be indifferent to any; and its furtherance of the wholesome purposes of society by training up its younger members in the way they should go, cannot fail to ensure it the patronage of the government it is under. Be assured it will meet all the protection which my office can give it. I salute you, holy sisters, with friendship and respect.1

As comforting as the president's words were, even a casual student of history knows that there often has been a significant disparity between theory and practice vis--vis the Catholic experience. Nonetheless, over the centuries, an implicit understanding did develop about what might be called a distribution of social responsibilities within our nation. The provision of many social goods and services was left to private associations and religiously sponsored charitable services. The role of local and state government by and large was confined to what today would be considered a rather narrow definition of preserving public order. It was in this area of the charitable provision of social services that Catholic women and men religious served so many people. Although in many instances the recipients of these services were fellow Catholics, more often than not the services were explicitly requested by public or private officials as a solution to an existing social need. For example:

In October 1861, the governor of Indiana, Oliver P. Morton, asked the Sisters of the Holy Cross to serve as nurses in Union hospitals. Within hours, a group of sisters was on its way from the sisters' home at St. Mary's Academy in Notre Dame, IN, to a military hospital in Paducah, KY. In the following months, additional groups of sisters were sent to manage hospitals in Mound City and Cairo, IL, where they served with distinction.2

The Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul, whose convent is located in Emittsburg, MD, just 10 miles from Gettsyburg, PA, tended both Union and Confederate casualties of this most horrific battle. The sisters served for weeks in one of the fields, tending the wounded in tents until they could be moved.3

During the New York City smallpox epidemic of 1875, people refused to go to the smallpox hospital on Blackwell's Island (now Roosevelt Island) because of conditions there. The city asked the Sisters of Charity at St. Vincent Hospital to take over the management of the smallpox hospital. Their impact was summarized in a report by the city government: "Since the change in management has been effected, the hospital has been steadily growing in popularity, and it is not at all unusual for us to be gratified with the sincere thanks of returned patients for the kindness and tender care which they received.... "4

Mother Marianne of Molokai, a sister of St. Francis, traveled from Syracuse, NY, in 1883 to take over a hospital for lepers in Honolulu. From there she moved to Molokai Island, an isolated leper settlement, where she and her other Franciscan Sisters found 1,000 people suffering from leprosy and living in chaos and degradation. From 1889 until 1916, she turned Molokai into a model facility for addressing a public health problem that civil authorities had left primarily to voluntary efforts.5

Implicit in these requests and the generous responses were a cluster of assumptions about how society was to be ordered. In other words, concomitant with the American commitment to individual responsibility, there was a recognition that some situations call for collective or communal responsibility in addition to individual responsibility. At times that responsibility was best exercised by private religious/charitable entities of their own volition; at other times, by those entities at the request of or in an informal partnership with the government. In these instances, the role of government was to provide the "space" needed for these activities (e.g., exemption from taxation) or a degree of financial support.