Catholic News Service
The Christian community’s long tradition of providing hands-on care for the sick continues in today’s complicated, ever-changing universe of medicine. It is a tradition rooted in very early church history.
This tradition always was motivated by the twofold goal of offering comfort and nurturing renewed health, while never losing sight of the suffering person’s inner spirit and dignity.
The care the sixth-century “Rule of St. Benedict” mandated for sick monks in monastic infirmaries illustrates the importance attached to this tradition. “Care of the sick must rank above and before all else, so that they may truly be served as Christ,” St. Benedict wrote.
He stipulated that “a separate room” must be “designated for the sick” and that they should be “served by an attendant who is God-fearing, attentive and concerned.”
But care for the sick under church auspices dates back further than Benedict’s time. Hospitals serving both the sick and the poor were established in the fourth century.
One of the best known of these hospitals was a complex of buildings erected outside Caesarea, the capital of Cappadocia in today’s central Turkey. It came to be called the “new city.”
St. Basil the Great, as Caesarea’s bishop, was instrumental in bringing the new city into being around the year 369. Remembered down through the centuries as one of the Cappadocian Fathers of the Church and for his influence on Eastern monasticism, St. Basil took the Christian call to practice mercy with utter seriousness.
A severe drought in Cappadocia during his ministry only served to deepen his concern for suffering people.
Someone who steals a man’s clothes would be called a “robber,” he once observed. He then famously proposed that someone able to clothe the naked, but who refuses to do so, should be considered a robber too.
The new city established outside Caesarea was a “charitable multiplex for the sick, the paralyzed, lepers and strangers,” according to Peregrine Horden, a British scholar who studied such early hospitals.
In a funeral oration after St. Basil’s death in 379, another Cappadocian father, St. Gregory Nazianzen, praised the new city. It was St. Basil’s purpose, he explained, to tend to the sick, wounded people, those suffering from leprosy and to the poor.
“Disease is regarded in a religious light” in the new city, and “sympathy is put to the test,” said St. Gregory.
But was hands-on medical care also practiced among Christians in the times of Christ and his earliest followers? Who then tended to physical wounds, set broken bones and did whatever possible to ease pain?
Many believe that Luke, writer of the Gospel of Luke and of the Acts of the Apostles, was a physician. Notably, the apostle Paul refers to him in the Letter to the Colossians as “the beloved physician” (4:14).
The New American Bible comments that “no Gospel writer is more concerned than Luke with the mercy and compassion of Jesus.”
Notice in the Gospel of Luke the kind of care the good Samaritan extended to an injured man he found along the road while traveling from Jerusalem to Jericho (Lk 10:29-37).
The parable of the good Samaritan says he “poured oil and wine” over the man’s wounds “and bandaged them.” Taking him to an inn, the Samaritan gave two silver coins to the innkeeper to provide for the man’s care, promising to check-in on the situation while returning from Jericho.
Luke often is described as a Syrian from the city of Antioch. The New American Bible says that his writing marks him as someone “highly literate both in the Old Testament traditions according to the Greek versions and in Hellenistic Greek writings.”
If, indeed, Luke was a physician, might he have been trained in practices linked to the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates? Possibly Luke encouraged the preventive medicine of proper exercise and a good diet. Perhaps he prescribed purgatives, bandaged wounds, understood the toll exacted by human suffering and endeavored to comfort the sick.
The great distance in time from ancient Christianity to the 21st century might suggest that little similarity exists between the Christian community’s hands-on medical care now and that mandated by a Basil or Benedict.
It surely would astonish Luke to witness the science, technology and high costs of medical care today, coupled with the great expectations contemporary patients have of medicine.
Yet, these eras are not entirely unalike, particularly in their underlying goals. “A Shared Statement of Identity for the Catholic Health Ministry” posted on the website of the Catholic Health Association of the United States makes this clear.
It affirms that those working in Catholic health care “continue Jesus’ mission of love and healing,” hoping to “defend human dignity” and “attend to the whole person.” They “foster healing, act with compassion and promote wellness,” paying special attention to the “poor, underserved and most vulnerable.”
I suspect St. Basil the Great, given his strong desire to follow Christ by bringing mercy into the lives of real, suffering people, would feel quite at home with all of that.
