A Practical Approach Toward a Culture of Catholic Primary Care

How can Catholic physicians avoid getting caught up in the prevailing secularized medical culture, and instead practice in a way that is distinctively “Catholic”? Taking this idea a step further, how might we transform American medicine through the application of the Church’s social teaching to our daily practice? I have pondered these questions often over my twenty-odd years practicing family medicine. My reflections form the basis of “Benedict Medicine: Creating a Culture of Catholic Primary Care”, the plenary lecture I will present on Thursday, September 4^th at the Catholic Medical Association’s Annual Educational Conference in Kansas City.

CMA members know that the contemporary medical culture has taken various stances at odds with the traditional Christian worldview. Mainstream specialty associations’ strident support for the abortion license and artificial reproductive technologies, their conferral of legitimacy to falsehoods about the nature of human sexuality, as well as the politicization of scientific discourse, have undermined the authentically Christian origins of Western medicine. Regarding care delivery, the commoditization of medicine into a transactional enterprise, increasingly driven by corporate and regulatory directives that fail to honor the relational interaction between doctor and patient, further erodes the human fabric of the profession. Primary care—and in a particular way family medicine, which encompasses the care of people at all stages of life—is at the forefront of these bioethical battle lines.

How should a Catholic medical professional respond? In this time of upheaval, I propose that we begin by interpreting the Church’s social teaching vis-à-vis our roles as physicians, striving to view our practice of medicine as an invitation to participate in the work of Christ the Divine Physician. Jesus’ commands flow through the Church’s social teachings and animate our professional vocations as his disciples. At this inflection point in the Church, our new pontiff Leo XIV is an echo of the last great Pope named Leo (Leo XIII), whose encyclical Rerum novarum (1891) continues to instruct us in the application of Catholic social doctrine to the challenges of the modern world.

While it is the duty of each Catholic medical professional to reflect on how Church teaching informs his or her individual practice of medicine, we are not called to carry out this exercise in isolation. Hence the raison d’être of the Benedict Medicine Consortium—a coalition of Catholics in primary care joined in fellowship while striving to discern how to live Catholic social teaching principles through their practices. Consortium members believe that primary care rooted in the truth and tradition of the Church are necessary pillars of support for local Christian communities. Much as the classical school movement has ignited the Catholic imagination of countless families yearning for a faithful educational alternative for their children that supports the domestic church, a vibrant culture of Catholic primary care can serve as a light in the darkness of our present nihilistic medical moment. Members of the Consortium convene quarterly to share their experiences as they strive to model Catholic social teaching principles in Christian charity and joyful service. The physicians who comprise the Benedict Medicine Consortium have designed their practices in a variety of ways–from volunteer free clinics to independent direct-pay practices—in response to local conditions and community needs. The common thread that unites us is our desire to maintain a Christ-centered focus to our daily work in primary care.

Rather than becoming despondent about the litany of ways in which secular culture has poisoned medicine’s spiritual wellspring, I propose we engage with the Litany of Saints, and with one another, for encouragement in our quest to restore medicine’s Christian telos—promoting authentic human flourishing by considering each person as made in the image and likeness of God. Calling on the Holy Spirit to make us instruments of renewal in our local communities, we ask for the intercession of two Benedicts—St. Benedict of Nursia, whose Rule preserved the faith and founded western monasticism–and Pope Benedict XVI, who called for a more vibrant, if smaller, Church. May the Benedict Medicine Consortium serve as a seed to build a culture of Catholic primary care!