L’Osservatore Romano 12 February 2015

Malaika Favorite, «Il buon samaritano»

A relationship of care cannot be reduced to a simple interaction between a healthy person and a sick person, between a technician who knows and a patient who is in need of help: it is a matter of two people who encounter each other on the journey of life. In his Message for the World Day of the Sick Pope Francis reads the verse of Job which is the chosen theme of the World Day ‘I was eyes for the blind, and feet for the lame’ (29:15) from the point of view of ‘wisdom of the heart’ and offers guidelines for people who are involved in providing care to the sick and the suffering.

The relationship between a medical doctor and a person in need of treatment is defined in the Charter for Health Care Workers as ‘a meeting between trust and conscience’; a relationship of care, therefore, is much more complex than it may at first appear. In providing care, professional abilities and capacities are naturally the first requisite but a cold impersonal scientific approach is not sufficient to help another person who is tormented by illness, by suffering, and by the anxiety that can be their result. This is not a mere performance of a task but, rather, and above all else for a health-care worker, the performance of a service, that is to say a ministry that the Christian tradition also calls diakonia. In addition, a solely scientific approach is not sufficient in attempting to understand the complexity of the interior world of each person which is something that goes beyond bio-physical aspects. To care for a person means, in reality, to bear in mind his or her physical dimensions but also his or her psychological and spiritual dimensions.

Thus it is that the Pope, in his approach of the wisdom of the heart, replaces the terms ‘person’, ‘patient’ and ‘sick person’ with the word ‘brother’. Medical practice and the therapeutic act can thus become our witness to the love of God in seeking to alleviate that suffering which ‘seems…almost inseparable from man’s earthly existence’ (Salvifici doloris, n. 3).

The Pope also descends to a very concrete level when he observes that such care can involve physical, psychological and spiritual burdens for a health-care worker or even for a person’s family relative, especially when that care is demanding and protracted. And yet it is a setting for the proclamation of the kingdom, when the action of care is holy time, and, says the Pope, is praise for God, which conforms us to the image of His Son who ‘came not to be served but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many’ (Matthew 20:28).

One can obtain an image of such care when the Pope in Evangelii gaudium refers to ‘the steadfast faith of those mothers tending their sick children who, though perhaps barely familiar with the articles of the creed, cling to a rosary; or of all the hope poured into a candle lighted in a humble home with a prayer for help from Mary’ (n.125).

Thus it is that where deontological codes commit us to always be servants of life, the Gospel goes beyond this and commits us to love life always and in all circumstances, above all when it needs especial attention and care.

     Health-care workers are called every day to rewrite the parable of the Good Samaritan, the man who made himself a neighbour of a suffering man, constantly using the ‘therapeutic charity of Christ’ for the benefit of Christ himself who is present in those who suffer.

This is witness that takes place at a cultural moment when, the Pope writes in his Message, a ‘great lie’ lurks behind certain expressions that lay great stress upon ‘quality of life’ and tend to spread and root that ‘throwaway culture’ that he has drawn attention to on a number of occasions in his speeches. This witness can be borne even if we live in an age which is – the Pope emphasises – dominated by a frenzy to do, to produce and to sell which makes people forget, with a purely individualist approach, the dimension of gratuitousness; the other person can even be seen only as a competitor, in an economic vision that seems to have set aside those words of the Lord which say ‘you did it to me’ (Matthew 25:40). In bearing witness one will attribute to the ‘other’ in one’s brother, even if sick and suffering, a human and Christian and human value and wealth. One is dealing, therefore, for health-care workers involved in the alleviation of human suffering, of contributing to that ‘culture of welcome’, invoked by the Pope, where the value of a person, of a brother or a sister, does not depend on his or her age or conditions of life.

The Message therefore expresses a further concern – that of serving one’s brothers and sisters avoiding all judgements, as happens, instead, with the friends of Job who although they are ready to help and are moved by sincere friendship, equipped with the theological approach of the time understood Job’s situation as that of a sinner who had to accept and pay for his sins, perhaps even being so obstinate as not to recognise this and thereby increasing his burden.

   The response to the needs of a suffering person must thus arise from a shared ‘being in life’, from a shared ‘taking part in the same human nature’, thereby leaving space for understanding and also for mercy. In order, therefore, to achieve a correct and Christian relationship of care, one must begin a personal conversion.