Luciano Sandrin – Camillianum

Pastoral care in health – which for the Church is an integral and indispensable part of her mission – can be described as the multiform activity of the Christian community in favour of people marked by pain, by illness, by disability and by frailty.  The word that perhaps best sums up pastoral care in health is healing, and the verb that best expresses its action is to heal, understood in its widest sense of caring for and taking care of. At the side of those who suffer, of the sick and of those who are dying, the Church discovers anew that she is a healing community  (a setting for healing), a sign and instrument of a healing that ‘saves’ man in his totality, a healing narrated and prefigured in experiences of health and of healing of a partial character as well.

Amongst the innovative contributions of pastoral care in health to the ordinary pastoral care of the Church one may place openness to the ecumenical horizon. Pastoral care in health is essentially ecumenical because no form of cooperation is more capable of aggregation than that which places itself at the service of people in relation to what they hold most dear and most vital – the promotion and the defence of life and health, especially at moments of particular suffering and vulnerability. The Churches are called to be healing communities, settings for the care and promotion of health understood in its totality and multi-dimensionality. The request for health and the community that responds to this request as a healing community (through the variety of its saving and health-generating activities) can become not only one of the important ecumenical settings in which the Churches encounter each other – settings for the healing of people and mutual reconciliation – but also one of the significant settings in which the great religions and the various spiritual sensibilities can engage in dialogue.

     John Paul II, in his Pastores dabo vobis, emphasised that pastoral formation ‘needs to be studied therefore as the true and genuine theological discipline that it is; pastoral or practical theology. It is a scientific reflection on the Church as she is built up daily, by the power of the Spirit, in history’ (n. 57). In every historical situation there is a recommendation of God, a provocation, and His invitation to new tasks, to new forms of presence and action. Increasingly today, the term ‘practical theology’ is preferred to ‘pastoral theology’ in order to emphasise the evangelising mission of the whole of the Church in today’s world and the form that her activity is called to take in various socio-cultural contexts. Pastoral theology and practical theology have different histories, the first belongs to the Catholic world and the second to the Protestant, but today that are both interested in seeing how theological thought can influence, and be influenced by, practical activity so as to produce an appropriate Christian response to the requests of today’s world. By now, theology has become aware that ‘practice constitutes an intrinsic dimension of faith itself, with the consequence that this dimension must enter into faith’s thought about itself, which is called theology’ (Juan Alfaro). Pastoral theology makes this its specific subject in an approach in which ‘practice is no longer seen as implementation subsequent to data established beforehand by theory but as the original setting for the elaboration of theory itself’ (Sergio Lanza). Pastoral care, as multiform activity of the Church in history, is a setting of theological knowledge (an experience of faith that is lived and acted, a pathway of discovery and cognitive exploration, and a moment of verification). Experiences which in various ways belong to the field of pastoral practice – in which salvation is proclaimed, welcomed, celebrated, achieved and given – are accessible only through authentic theological knowledge, but in their turn they precede and found all theological thought. Experiences connected with health and the various forms of healing (caring for, taking care of, consoling, comforting, etc.) are ‘settings’ not only of historically ascertained expressions of pastoral care and theology but also ‘generative settings’ of theological thought and of renewed expressions of pastoral care. The various expressions by which healing can be declined can be seen as practical theology (healing as practical theology) (Susan J. Dunlap).

 ‘Only if I serve my neighbour’, writes Benedict XVI, ‘can my eyes be opened to what God does for me and how much he loves me’. Love for neighbour is a road on which to encounter God, to know Him, and to be able to find a language to speak about Him, to be accredited ‘theo-logians’ of Him: ‘closing our eyes to our neighbour also blinds us to God’ (Deus caritas est, nn.18 and 16). Experience of love is a true form of knowledge. And Pope Francis has observed: ‘Mercy in the light of Easter enables us to perceive it as a true form of awareness. This is important: mercy is a true form of awareness… because mercy opens the door of the mind in order to better understand the mystery of God and of our personal existence’. Mercy, in its expressions of compassion and forgiveness as well, is ‘a form of practical theology’ – an experience which draws us near to knowledge of God (theology) by ‘contextualising’, that is to say by placing our theologies in relation to Him, theologies which in Him and in His Christ can and must encounter each other.

‘How can I find a benign God?’ This was the question that for a long time tormented the young Martin Luther until one day he recognised that in its Biblical meaning the justice of God is not punitive justice but justifying justice, and, therefore, His mercy. Walter Kasper writes in a summarising way on this point: ‘The most important contribution of Martin Luther to advancing ecumenism did not lie in ecclesiological approaches which in him still remained open but in his original orientation towards the gospel of the grace and the mercy of God and the call to conversion. The message of the mercy of God was the answer to his personal problem and need, like the questions of his time; it is also today the answer to the signs of the times and the pressing questions of many people. Only the mercy of God can heal the deep wounds that the division inflicted on the body of Christ – the Church’. The ‘harmonies’ of the various Christian communities are deep on this subject. Mercy was specifically the great subject that Pope Francis proposed for the last jubilee.

We are called to a pastoral conversion, remembering, however, that ‘pastoral care’, as we are reminded by Pope Francis, is nothing else but rediscovering and exercising the motherhood of the Church: ‘She gives birth, suckles, gives growth, corrects, nourishes and leads by the hand … So we need a Church capable of rediscovering the maternal womb of mercy. Without mercy we have little chance nowadays of becoming part of a world of “wounded” persons in need of understanding, forgiveness, love’.

    At the side of those who suffer, those who are sick and those who are dying, the Churches can rediscover that maternal, relational, welcoming and generative dimension that vivifies them and draws them together.