Franciscans and Healthcare: What is the Future?

FRANCISCANS AND HEALTHCARE: OUR HERITAGE

3 FRANCISCANS AND HEALTHCARE: OUR HERITAGE Dominic V. Monti, O.F.M. In his delightful introduction to the Franciscan tradition, Poverty and Joy, William Short singles out compassion for the leper as one of the defining themes of our spirituality. 1 As a historian I certainly know that Franciscans and healthcare have always been intimately connected. When we look at our Franciscan sources, the writings and lives of Francis and Clare and the story of the early Franciscan movement, we are confronted again and again with a paramount reality—that of illness, of sick people. Indeed, from an examination of our sources and subsequent history, one must conclude with Short that the care of the sick—especially those who are poor and marginalized—can be considered among the basic charisms of our Franciscan movement. For all Franciscans, our attitude and behavior towards those who are sick form an essential part of our call to Gospel conversion. For many Franciscans, meeting the needs of the sick is the work to which they dedicate their active ministry. In this paper I will examine briefly the medieval context to understand better why and how the first Franciscan men and women were impelled to enter the ministry of healthcare. Then, I will delineate the chief stages that have marked the involvement of Franciscans in healthcare ministry since that time. The Medieval Context Why did the first Franciscan men and women feel compelled to enter the ministry of healthcare? Simply because serving the sick was demanded by their decision “to follow in the footsteps of Christ” (ER 1:1). 2 who embraced all the people of his world. Sick people, dying people, were a prominent part of the first Franciscans’ 1 William Short, OFM, Poverty and Joy: The Franciscan Tradition (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1999), 34-35, 72-80. 2 References to the writings of Francis and early biographies are from Francis of Assisi: Early Documents, ed. Regis Armstrong, Wayne Hellmann, and William Short, Vol. I: The Saint (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 1999). 4 DOMINIC V. MONTI, O.F.M. world, so they had to embrace sickness and death, the harsh facts of everyday existence. In our modern technological culture, where seriously ill and dying people inhabit a separate sanitized world, we may read Francis’s “Canticle of the Creatures” simply as a hymn to cosmic fraternity, overlooking these poignant lines: Praised be you, my Lord, through those who bear infirmity and tribulation. Blessed are they who endure in peace. . . . Praised be you, my Lord, though our Sister, Bodily Death, from whom no one living can escape (CtC 10-12). Francis and Clare had to face these realities—infirmity, physical suffering, and the ever-present threat of death—constantly. They characterized medieval life. Few people would have disagreed with the graphic assessment of the Franciscan mystic, Jacopone of Todi: Jagged life, unremitting battle, How you crest in pain! Still within my mother’s womb, I was pledged to death; How I survived in that closed, cramped darkness I cannot say. When I emerged it was in anguish and pain. I was wrapped in a sack for a mantle, And when it was opened There I lay, bloodied, wretched, Greeting life with a wail, My entrance song. . . . O jagged life, look where you have led me, All the livelong day is passed in tribulation! Toil and weariness, will you never come to an end? . . . . Then, of course, there’s the pain of fevers, The ones doctors cannot heal With simple incantations. To prescribe rose syrup or the like They charge you by the bushel! The number of woes to which man is subject Would be hard to set in rhyme. (Doctors, to be sure, know more than a little about thisThey who write the prescriptions FRANCISCANS AND HEALTHCARE: OUR HERITAGE 5 and charge handsome fees.) Will this weariness never end? 3 We might view this medieval focus on suffering and death as morbid and perhaps a bit bizarre—but I am sure that Jacopone would find it just as odd that modern doctors and nurses have to take special courses to learn how to cope with these basic human realities. He knew them well. He and his contemporaries were engaged in an “unremitting battle” against illness and death from the first moments of their lives. A medieval town was not a healthy place. Houses were packed together within its protective walls, resulting...