BY: JUDY CASSIDY
This year's Catholic Health Assembly came at the end of a century that has seen moral poverty on a grand scale — in two world wars; the Holocaust; the killing fields of Cambodia and Vietnam, Mississippi, Eastern Europe, and Africa. Not by accident, the assembly cut to the quick of questions troubling many in the Catholic health ministry as they look toward the new millennium: What is a moral society? Is there reason to hope that our society can become a moral bulwark in the world? What part must the ministry play in transforming our society?
In his assembly keynote address, Elie Wiesel asserted that a moral society is judged by how it treats all who suffer or are vulnerable. Wiesel, a survivor of the Holocaust, forced us to think about our society's dark indifference to children, old people, the poor, and the mentally disabled. Our moral insensibility manifests itself in many ways — gun violence, drug abuse, inadequate care for the frail elderly, millions of uninsured people.
As Wiesel said, a society that would be moral must oppose this pervasive unconcern. Catholic health and social organizations, which have reached out to those who suffer since America began, exemplify what must happen throughout a community that is ethical — that treats all persons as human beings made in God's image. Today, like a vine that finds its way around or through an obstacle, the Catholic health ministry continues to seek ways to meet the needs of society's weakest members. The articles throughout this issue paint a vivid portrait of Catholic organizations' bold tactics in an environment where others are cowering behind the hard shields of self-protection and timidity.
The organizations described here demonstrate that the Catholic health ministry can be a vine strong enough to crack a stone wall, breaking down the indifference and cruelty of society. Similar to the vine that grows even in stone, these Catholic health organizations are thriving in the harshest environments. But they succeed precisely because they plant their decisions in the fertile soil of their mission, rather than the barren sand of society's indifference. They are, in the words of assembly speaker J. Bryan Hehir, in the marketplace but not of it.
I hope this issue inspires those who cultivate the Catholic health ministry to strengthen their efforts in their own marketplaces as they seek to be instruments in the process of the transformation that will yield a moral society.
Copyright © 1998 by the Catholic Health Association of the United States
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