Heal the sick!

By the Catholic Medical Association’s Committee for the New Evangelization

Formerly the Guild of Catholic Doctors, the Catholic Medical Association (CMA) was founded in 1911. As healthcare has changed, so has the CMA: such that a few years ago we chose to admit not only Catholic doctors but Catholics from all branches of healthcare.

This is undoubtedly a good thing, as modern healthcare teams are multidisciplinary and thus our organization reflects the contemporary healthcare team. Consequently, it can draw on the skills and experience of a wide range of healthcare professionals.

The Catholic Medical Quarterly is the journal of the CMA and has been published in its current format since 1947, but can trace its heritage back to at least the 1930s. The CMA has also fostered medical missionary training and supported medical missions through the Catholic Medical Mission Society, founded in 1967.

Two years ago, a group of young Catholics in healthcare approached the CMA with a request to set up a new committee to support young Catholics in healthcare through prayer, friendship, and catechesis. This was prompted by our experience of seeing so many of our young Catholic colleagues in healthcare fall away from the Faith and our sense of the urgent need to support them. Since our foundation, we have successfully run a variety of events, including two national youth conferences (talks for which will appear on Radio Immaculata very soon!), transforming the CMA Facebook page into an engaging platform which continues to grow, and producing attractive prayer cards to St Giuseppe Moscati (an Italian doctor who lived a century ago).

We named our committee the ‘Committee for the New Evangelization’, taking our inspiration from Bishop Philip Egan’s emphasis on John Paul II’s call to find new ways to evangelize against the backdrop of our sophisticated modern secular society – the so-called ‘New Evangelization.' Bishop Egan has said that this New Evangelization, ‘must be streetwise, media-savvy and critically aware of the culture we live in. Contemporary culture is less a text-based, book culture; it is more a visual culture of concepts, image, art, style and design. We need to see our Catholic Tradition as a toolbox from which things can be taken and used to communicate the message imaginatively and attractively.’

Since many of our committee regularly attend the Traditional Mass, we approached the Latin Mass Society to ask for help to run an event for young Catholics in healthcare (and open to all young pro-life Catholics). This has come to fruition in our upcoming conference ‘Catholics in Healthcare: Men and Women of Conscience’. This conference will be held at Tyburn Convent in London and is in many ways a collaboration between Tyburn Convent, the CMA, LMS, SPUC and Radio Immaculata. There will be a Missa cantata followed by lunch and talks. The event will be broadcast on Radio Immaculata. Tyburn Convent is the National Shrine of the Martyrs of England and Wales, so it is fitting that the event should include the Mass at which they would have prayed and for which they died.

Healthcare is, as it were, on a front line against the culture of death and that proximity puts many Catholics off going into it. However, it also offers plenty of opportunities to witness to the Faith. Many of us in healthcare believe we are heeding our Lord’s call to ‘heal the sick’, something the Church has done from the beginning. As the CMA undergoes an exciting resurgence, we beg your prayers and support that we may continue to grow and thus support young Catholics in healthcare to help them keep the Faith.

If you are a healthcare worker, please come to our conference on 10 March.

For more information about the conference search Catholic Medical Association of England and Wales on Facebook.