Bishop James D. Conley serves as National Episcopal Advisor to the Catholic Medical Association. He delivered the homily at the opening Mass for the Catholic Medical Association’s 95th annual education conference Sept. 10 in Phoenix. The theme of the conference was “Mysteries and Miracles: Restoring the Practice of Medicine to heal the Whole Person.”
What better way to begin our conference than with the celebration of the mystery of the Holy Eucharist and the miracle of the “real presence” of Christ.
As St. Teresa of Calcutta would often say, “unless we can see the face of Jesus disguised in the appearance of the bread, we will never see his face in the distressing disguise of the poor and the sick.”
St. Paul reminds us in his First Letter to the Corinthians, that “knowledge inflates with pride… but if one loves God, one is known by him.” St. Paul then relates this kind of “inflated knowledge” with idolatry and as a false God!
How do we resist this idolatry of “inflated knowledge?” We do so by allowing God to love us first, and then by seeking to know him better.
In other words, formation in Christ comes before mere information about Christ. Formation of this kind, the formation we receive in prayer and humility at a conference like this, leads us into the divine logic and mystery that Jesus speaks about in today’s gospel: “love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those curse you, pray for those who mistreat you.”
So what does this “divine logic” mean for us who are called to the ministry of health care? We are at this conference to yes, learn information from those who are experts in their field, but more importantly, we are here for formation, formation not just of our minds, but formation for our hearts and souls as we minister to the whole person, the whole patient who comes to us for healing.
And a real risk for all of us who are called to the healing profession, is that we allow the idolatry of this super-inflated knowledge to divorce us from the “art of healing,” the art of the person-to-person encounter with the mystery and miracle of the imago Dei, the image of God in every human person.
So, what do I mean? I propose that a certain kind of knowledge, governed by a technocratic paradigm, is at risk of driving out the focus on another person. Metrics, algorithms, efficiency, and profit margins risk becoming idols.
The physician who sees 70 patients a day, eight minutes at a time, is caught in a structure of sin. Efficiencies coming from AI, thought by some to be our savior for this situation, we now know is mostly adding patients to the schedule—not giving practitioners more time at the service of the persons they encounter, the imago Dei.
In a talk she gave this week at Benedictine College, Dr. Kristin Collier, MD, PhD, from the University of Michigan Medical School, said that the last several decades in health care has led to a “justification of a retreat from the patient as person, every step of the way.” The intern, she says: “cares for people with diabetes”… while the fellow says she “sees diabetics”… while the attending says, “I manage diabetes.”
Participation in this structure of sin removes one further and further from the “patient as person” and further and further from the vocation that brought them into health care in the first place. No wonder there is so much mental and spiritual illness associated with the healing professions.
In a recent article in JAMA, Zeke Emanuel said, “For the last 75 years, medicine has emphasized science rather than the art of medicine. We do not screen students for admission to medical school on the basis of their emotional intelligence and human sensitivity. What are the prerequisites? Organic chemistry, physics, calculus — not the humanities… This idea that art is so important to medicine — we don’t behave like that.”
Emanuel was making the positive case for the coming revolution in AI-delivered health care, without a human in the loop. But the idea of AI-delivered healthcare could only make sense if we operate with an impoverished anthropology of medicine. Unfortunately, that is the anthropology medicine has been using for the living memory of nearly everyone in this room. AI did not invent the problem, but it sure looks like it will supercharge the problem.
But the news isn’t all bad. Here’s something else that the disruption of the AI revolution has done: we now have a golden opportunity to re-member our traditional Catholic understanding of health care and make a case for it to the world. The very nature of health care itself is explicitly up for cultural grabs. We have a golden opportunity to critique and resist a system run by the bean-counters and efficiency mongers—and put the radical love of Christ back at the center of patient care.
Some may call such an idea unrealistic, but Pope Leo in Magnifica Humanitias takes pains to build up the courage of those who are at risk for what he calls “false realism,” the idea that we are forced to slouch toward continuing to build the Tower of Babel because, well, everyone else is doing it.
And yes, the Gospel does seem radical and even unrealistic in a world dominated by idolatry and the structures of sin which support it. But it is very often the beauty of the Gospel vision which ultimately wins the day.
His predecessor, Pope Leo XIII, looked at the techno-industrial revolution of the 19th Century and saw a frightened world with no moral vocabulary for what was happening to work, the family, and human dignity. He provided this vocabulary with Rerum novarum. It no doubt seemed unrealistic at the time, but his intervention changed what was possible to say… and therefore what became possible to do. We all know that verbal engineering always precedes social engineering. Eventually we got child labor protections, the right for workers to unionize and collectively bargain, minimum wage laws, and much more that, again, would have been considered impossible before Leo XIII’s intervention.
Leo XIV is self-consciously doing a similar thing right now with Magnifica Humanitas. And many in this room are the ones he is counting on to carry this vision into health care. He needs all of us to help him.
We must be absolutely clear: the vocation of one called to health care is totally at odds with the idea that doctors are vendors, providing a service to the twin idols of algorithmic efficiency and profit margins. He or she is practicing an ancient profession and art, directed toward objective natural and supernatural ends.
This, then, is the massive opportunity for Catholic health care hidden inside the AI revolution. The questions this revolution has forced open, have created a Catholic-sized cultural hole that we are uniquely poised to fill. One in six beds in the United States is in a Catholic facility. We have a newly updated version of the Ethical and Religious Directives, the official “field guide” for Catholic medicine. We already have a substantial Catholic health education system in place—and new and faithful medical schools and nursing schools are on the way. Robustly Catholic undergraduate institutions are flourishing. And new adult converts are coming into the Catholic Church— streaming in—each year.
Brothers and sisters, this is our time. A time for smashing idols and replacing the radical love of Christ, the Divine Physician, at the center of our profession. Not at all to serve of our own power, pride, or self-righteousness. But to serve those on margins… the least among us. Those who bear the Face of Christ in a special way. Those who health care practitioners are afforded a unique opportunity to serve.
