The Catholic Spirit: When life hurts: A study day focused on the Church's response to pain and suffering

I recently heard a radio ad for an online casino that captures the American zeitgeist. After describing his life of physical chaos, professional wrestler Drew McIntyre delivers the pitch: “When life feels like a battle, kick up your feet, have some fun, and place a bet with (casino name omitted).”

The culture of escape

It is the suggested response to the pain that fails. As a practicing Catholic, I am confident that a wager on the Minnesota Twins game will not heal my knees, my anxiety or my soul. Yet secular culture increasingly promotes escape as the answer to every form of human pain. Numb it. Mask it. Dispose of it.

Too often, public policy follows the crowd instead of leading it. In an era of bitter division, some of the Minnesota Legislature’s most significant bipartisan efforts have involved marijuana legalization, psychedelic pilot programs, and attempts to legalize sports gambling — each offered as relief for some type of pain, whether physical, mental or economic.

Policymakers want to be heroes in the war on pain, and the fastest route is to hand people the escape of their choice. This is not compassion. It is expediency wearing compassion’s clothes. At its logical terminus stands the gravest escape of all: the proposition that when people are judged more burdensome than useful, and pain cannot be dulled, sufferers should be given the means to dispose of themselves.

A different vision of healing

The Church has a different answer because she begins with a different anthropology. A person is not merely a machine that hurts, a body to be repaired, or a bundle of symptoms to be managed. The human person is body and soul — physical, mental and spiritual — and pain can touch each dimension. A society unwilling to acknowledge the spiritual will remain ill-equipped to understand suffering or offer the fullness of healing.

Modeling her care on Christ himself, the Church built ministries of healing long before healthcare became an industry — and before insurance became its organizing logic. She built them on a premise the industry has never supplied: human dignity does not rise or fall with health, independence, productivity or convenience. The Church’s healthcare mission recognizes the physical, psychological, social and spiritual dimensions of each person.

Honoring the spiritual dimension of the human person does not mean romanticizing pain, withholding medicine or telling a suffering person simply to “offer it up.” The Church’s “Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services” identifies effective pain relief and symptom management as essential. But the directives also insist on personal and spiritual accompaniment —care that addresses the conditions that so often drive self-medication and escapism: isolation, fear, powerlessness, alienation and the search for meaning.

That is the inspiration behind Righteous Relief: Addressing Pain and Suffering From the Heart of the Church, a study day for medical professionals, clergy, caregivers and Catholic leaders, co-hosted by the Catholic Health Association of Minnesota and the Minnesota Catholic Conference.

Read the rest of the article at The Catholic Spirit.