Don’t Forget That One End Of Medicine Is Advancing Dignity

 

05/10/2006 Bishop Robert Vasa

BEND — This past week’s itinerary took me on a drive from Bend to the airport in Klamath Falls, to Portland to Sacramento to Modesto back to Klamath Falls for a drive to Lakeview then to Chiloquin then to Bly, then back to Chiloquin then back to the point of origin in Bend, all between Wednesday afternoon and Sunday afternoon. In the midst of that travel, I attended a Catholic Medical Association board meeting, celebrated the conference opening Mass at Modesto, gave a presentation at the Modesto CMA Guild Formation Conference, administered confirmation at St. Patrick’s in Lakeview, and said Mass at Our Lady of Mount Carmel in Chiloquin and at St. James in Bly. It was an interesting several days and, all things considered, not too tiring.

Entering into medical-moral and faith discussions with physicians is always fascinating. One topic of discussion is usually the problem of pain and suffering. This is not new. In the fourth century, St. Augustine commented in his famous work, The City of God, Book I, Chapter 8: “when good and bad men suffer alike, they are not, for that reason indistinguishable because what they suffer is similar. The sufferers are different even though the sufferings are the same trials; though what they endure is the same, their virtue and vice are different.” Augustine, as a good philosopher, transcends from the pain itself, the specific malady, and points out something which we have all observed but perhaps have not adequately considered.

He continues: “For, in the same fire, gold gleams and straw smokes; under the same flail the stalk is crushed and the grain threshed; the lees are not mistaken for oil because they have issued from the same press. So, too, the tide of trouble will test, purify, and improve the good, but beat, crush, and wash away the wicked. So it is that, under the weight of the same affliction, the wicked deny and blaspheme God, and the good pray to Him and praise Him. The difference is not in what people suffer but in the way they suffer. The same shaking that makes fetid water stink makes perfume issue a more pleasant odor.”

“The difference is not in what people suffer but in the way they suffer.” It is here that the work of the CMA, or any Catholic or Christian physician for that matter, can make a substantial difference for the one in the midst of pain. It is not only a matter or question of trying to alleviate pain, which is a good and necessary goal, but to recognize that our attitude toward or about pain is something that technically correct medicine may not be equipped to handle.

This is obliquely referred to in the Vatican II Decree on the Apostolate of Lay People (Apostolicam Actuositatem): “In the course of history the use of temporal things has been tarnished by serious defects. Under the influence of original sin men have often fallen into very many errors about the true God, human nature and the principles of morality. As a consequence, human conduct and institutions become corrupted, the human person itself held in contempt. Again, in our own days, not a few, putting an immoderate trust in the conquests of science and technology, turn off into a kind of idolatry of the temporal; they become the slaves of it rather than the masters” (7). Imagine how this prophetic passage applies to the concept in Oregon of physician-assisted suicide.

In another Vatican II Document, The Church in the Modern World (Gaudium et Spes), we read: “Finding himself in the midst of the battlefield, man has to struggle to do what is right, and it is at great cost to himself, and aided by God’s grace, that he succeeds in achieving his own inner integrity. Hence the Church of Christ, trusting in the design of the creator and admitting that progress can contribute to man’s true happiness, still feels called upon to echo the words of the apostle: ‘Do not be conformed to this world’ (Romans 12:2).’World’ here means a spirit of vanity and malice whereby human activity from being ordered to the service of God and man is distorted to an instrument of sin” (37).

This passage certainly applies to every walk of life but it seems to me that, in our medically and technically advancing culture, it applies in a particularly powerful way to the development and use of medical procedures which, while capable of reducing pain in its many varied forms, are incapable of answering the question about whether it is right or good for them to be done. This certainly applies to embryonic stem cell work, fetal experimentation, use of cell lines from aborted fetuses, many of the reproductive technologies, sterilization processes, terminal sedation (a very lovely term for murder of the elderly or incompetent), and who knows what they will conceive of next. Not being “conformed to this world” does not mean rejecting any and all medical or scientific advancements but it does mean being very careful about the attitude that “if we can, we must, even if we morally shouldn’t” as opposed to the faith-based response: “if we shouldn’t, then we mustn’t, even if we can.”

“The difference is not in what people suffer but in the way they suffer.” We certainly need to expend energy to help assure the proper and moral alleviation of “what” people suffer, but we must not forget that a huge part of what Jesus came to teach us was that the true advancement and promotion of human dignity comes about when we help people with the “way” they suffer. One eliminates either the suffering or the sufferer while the other recognizes and enhances the dignity of the person even in the midst of suffering.