Catholic Church and health care
Cathedral schools evolved into a well integrated network of medieval universities and Catholic scientists (many of them clergymen) made a number of important discoveries which aided the development of modern science and medicine.
While the prioritization of charity and healing by early Christians created the hospital, their spiritual emphasis tended to imply "the subordination of medicine to religion and doctor to priest".
The Church, while being a major provider of health care to HIV AIDS sufferers, and of orphanages for unwanted children, has been criticised for opposing condom use.
In orations such as his Sermon on the Mount and stories such as the Parable of the Good Samaritan, Jesus called on followers to worship God (Rpm 12:1-2) through care for our neighbor: the sick, hungry and poor.
[5] According to James Joseph Walsh, writing in the Catholic Encyclopedia: Christ Himself gave His followers the example of caring for the sick by the numerous miracles He wrought to heal various forms of disease including the most loathsome, leprosy.
[6] Deacons were assigned the task of distributing alms, and in Rome by 250 AD the Church had developed an extensive charitable outreach, with wealthy converts supporting the poor.
Cosmas and Damian, brothers from Cilicia in Asia Minor, supplanted the pagan Asclepius as the patron saints of medicine and were celebrated for their healing powers.."[13] Said to have lived in the late third century AD and to have performed a miraculous first leg transplant on a patient, and later martyred under the Emperor Diocletian, Cosmas and Damian appear in the heraldry of barber-surgeon companies.."[13] Notable contributors to the medical sciences of those early centuries include Tertullian (born 160 AD), Clement of Alexandria, Lactantius and the learned St. Isidore of Seville (d. 636).
[22] The famous Knights Hospitaller arose as a group of individuals associated with an Amalfitan hospital in Jerusalem, which was built to provide care for poor, sick or injured pilgrims to the Holy Land.
Influenced by the rediscovery of Aristotelian thought, churchmen like the Dominican Albert Magnus and the Franciscan Roger Bacon made significant advances in the observation of nature.
From just 12 beds in 1288, the Sta Maria Nuova in Florence "gradually expanded by 1500 to a medical staff of ten doctors, a pharmacist, and several assistants, including female surgeons", and was boasted of as the "first hospital among Christians".
The medieval universities of Western Christendom were well-integrated across all of Western Europe, encouraged freedom of enquiry and produced a great variety of fine scholars and natural philosophers, including Robert Grosseteste of the University of Oxford, an early expositor of a systematic method of scientific experimentation,[25] and Saint Albert the Great, a pioneer of biological field research.
[24] From the 14th century, the European Renaissance saw a revival of interest in Classical learning in Western Europe, coupled with and fuelled by the spread of new inventions like the printing press.
The Catholic scholar Desiderius Erasmus (1466–1536) was interested in medicine and influential in reviving Greek as a language of learning, and the study of the pre-Christian works of Galen.
Roy Porter wrote that "after centuries where the Church had taught mankind to renounce worldly goods, for the sake of eternity, Renaissance man showed an insatiable curiosity for the materiality of the here and now...".
[14] It is often wrongly asserted that the papacy banned dissection during the period, though in fact the directive of Pope Sixtus IV of 1482 to the University of Tübingen said that the Church had no objection to anatomy studies, provided the bodies belonged to an executed criminal, and was given a religious burial once examinations were completed.
[28] In 2013, Robert Calderisi wrote that the Catholic Church has around 18,000 clinics, 16,000 homes for the elderly and those with special needs, and 5,500 hospitals – with 65 per cent of them located in developing countries.
[31] Observing the processes of pollination at his monastery in modern Czechoslovakia, Mendel studied and developed theories pertaining to the field of science now called genetics.
Darwin saw that all living things are connected, that ultimately they trace their ancestry to a single, common source; Mendel's work provided the mechanism to explain how that could happen".
[37] In 2017, controversy arose when an Associated Press report, which the Vatican criticized, stated that Bambino Gesu (Baby Jesus) Pediatric Hospital, a cornerstone of Italy's health care system and administered by the Holy See, put children at risk between 2008 and 2015 and turned its attention to profit after losing money and expanding services.
[38] The Spanish and Portuguese Empires were largely responsible for spreading the Catholic faith and its philosophy regarding health care to South and Central America, where the church established substantial hospital networks.
[39] The church has carried a disproportionate number of poor and uninsured patients at its facilities and the American bishops first called for universal health care in America in 1919.
Initially founding a school, she then gathered other sisters who "rescued new-born babies abandoned on rubbish heaps; they sought out the sick; they took in lepers, the unemployed, and the mentally ill".
[54] Catholic organisations in New Zealand remain heavily involved in community activities including education, health services, chaplaincy to prisons, rest homes, and hospitals, social justice, and human rights advocacy.
Caritas Internationalis is the Church's main international aid and development body and operates in over 200 countries and territories and co-operates closely with the United Nations.
[61][62] Following the election of Pope Francis in 2013, UNAIDS wrote that the Church "provides support to millions of people living with HIV around the world" and that "Statistics from the Vatican in 2012 indicated that Catholic Church-related organizations provide approximately a quarter of all HIV treatment, care, and support throughout the world and run more than 5,000 hospitals, 18,000 dispensaries and 9,000 orphanages, many involved in AIDS-related activities."
UNAIDS co-operates closely with the Church on critical issues such as the elimination of new HIV infections in children and keeping their mothers alive, as well as increasing access to antiretroviral medication.
[65] In early March 2020, in the United States, Catholic churches practiced avoiding hugs and handshakes as a precautionary measure against spreading the virus.
[68] In public debates, particularly among Western nations like the United States, this has raised questions over insurance public/private financial co-operation and government interference and regulation of health facilities.
This is a small price to pay for creative diversity which delivers healthcare of the highest standard with a special character cherished by many citizens, not just Catholics.The Catholic Church's opposition to abortion has also restricted its hospitals' treatment of miscarriages.
[74] In 2016, a woman was refused treatment according to the "Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services"[67] for her dislodged IUD, although she was bleeding, cramping and in pain.
