The volume ‘Lineamenti di Teologia Pastorale della Salute’ (‘Lineaments of the Theology of Pastoral Care in Health’), edited by M. Pietrini, G. M. Salvati, E. Sapori and E. Sgreccia,  has just been published by Edizioni Camilliane. Born from a request made by the Order of the Ministers of the Sick, it brings together the thinking of lecturers at the Camillianum, the International Institute for the Theology of Pastoral Care in Health which has behind it twenty-five years of teaching and research.

Fr. Renato Salvatore, the Superior General of the Camillians, in his preface to the text, dwells upon the academic project of the Camillianum, of which this volume is a faithful mirror. ‘The Camillianum examines the questions and issues connected with the vulnerability of the human condition and Christian hope from a theological-pastoral perspective in which theology, philosophy and human sciences engage in dialogue. It offers a theology of pastoral care in health which sees in mercy and tenderness its epistemological model…The Institute trains people to address the emerging bioethical questions of scientific and technological progress in the biomedical field within the horizon of human rights, in a multicultural context, with especial attention paid to the distribution of resources within the framework of international cooperation’.

‘This volume’, continues Fr. Salvatore, ‘seeks to demonstrate that there is a finiteness that produces hope. The faces, the figures and the places of the world of health and illness constitute not only the registers of human vulnerability but also the space of a unique charity since ‘the charity that loves neighbour is no different from that which loves God’…These pages…in balancing research and formation, offer a plan of Love that listens to contemporary disquiet, which is not very inclined to engage in edifying discourse’.