A healing community. From pastoral care in health to the health of pastoral care

From the introduction

If service to the sick and the suffering has been for the Church ever since the beginning of her history an ‘integral part of her mission’, it is the task of those who work in this kind of pastoral care to make ‘visible’ this reality by calling all of the Christian community to its commitment at the side of the sick, of those who suffer, and of those who take care of them in the vast socio-health-care world. But is also the task of those who think theologically about the action of the Church in the world of health and health care, in particular during the most frail moments of health, to call people’s attention to how the (salvific and health-inducing) healing dimension is not only present in a specific example of pastoral care, and in special fields, but must also be recognised as an integral part of being the Church and her activity at the level of pastoral care. This is a characteristic of her identity.