Ray Pennings, Executive Vice President of Cardus, shares the value of preserving faith-based healthcare institutions in Canada.
Healthcare is about more than beds filled, pills dispensed, and wait times measured. It is a human response to suffering. Medicinal technology has advanced by leaps and bounds, from leeches to laparoscopes, yet every encounter still begins with a person who needs care and another who chooses to give it.
For Christians, that choice grows from a belief that every person bears the image of God. Early Christians became known for caring for abandoned children, widows, and the poor. In what would become Canada, religious communities established hospitals and other forms of care centuries before Confederation. Their work continues today in hospitals, hospices, seniors’ homes, and neighbourhood programs across the country and around the world.
The future of this work is less certain. At St. Martha’s Regional Hospital in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, an agreement preserving the hospital’s Catholic mission ended on September 30. The Sisters of St. Martha, who founded it in 1906, sought another Catholic sponsor but the province decided against that option. On October 1, the hospital became Antigonish Memorial Regional Hospital and the signs of its 120-year Catholic identity were relocated to a nearby museum.
On the opposite coast, a B.C. court challenge asks whether faith-based hospitals may continue declining to provide euthanasia and assisted suicide (also known as medical assistance in dying, or MAiD) on site. The province has established a clinical space beside Vancouver’s St. Paul’s Hospital where patients can receive MAiD under the care of a different health authority. The case raises difficult questions about patients’ experiences, public funding, and the freedom of an institution to practise the convictions behind its care. Those questions deserve serious attention from Christians, including compassion for patients and families who have found a transfer distressing.
With these pressures in mind, Cardus gathered faith-based healthcare leaders and practitioners earlier this year. We summarized the discussion in a forthcoming report.
Through this symposium, we wanted to hear from those who know them best about what their institutions contribute today and what they need to continue. One conviction surfaced throughout the discussion: faith changes how caregivers understand the person before them. Humans are relational creatures with an interconnected body, soul, and spirit. We cannot treat any part of a person without affecting their whole being.
A patient brings more to an appointment than symptoms. Illness may unsettle a marriage, interrupt work, awaken fear, or leave someone wondering what their life means now. Good clinical care matters enormously. Faith-based institutions also make room for spiritual questions and relationships, including when treatment has reached its limits. A chaplain’s visit, a conversation with a nurse, or a family’s presence at the bedside can become part of caring well.
Caring well in a faith context means caring for caregivers, too. Healthcare workers face exhaustion and grief, sometimes while trying to meet needs far beyond what a shift allows. Participants spoke about the importance of helping medical staff find community and meaning in demanding work. The workers, too, have dignity, and training and preparing them for their difficult work – in unique ways that incorporate their faith – matters. Their conscience rights, used to protect both the worker and the patient, also matter.
In offering this care, Christians are not alone. Montreal’s Jewish General Hospital, as one example, opened in 1934, founded on Jewish values that include reverence for life and care for those in need. It has welcomed patients of every background. Its history shows how a community’s faith can give rise to an institution that belongs, in its service, to everyone.
Many Canadians who enter a faith-based hospital do not share its beliefs. They still benefit from its trained staff, donors, volunteers, and ties to the surrounding community.
Preserving these connections will take effort from Christian communities themselves. The symposium participants saw a need to prepare leaders who understand both healthcare and their institution’s mission. They wanted stronger connections among providers so that effective programs could spread. They also recognized that Canadians need to see what faith-based care does now through the lives of patients and communities it serves.
Secularization makes that account more urgent. If faith becomes merely a detail in an institution’s history, or an exhibit in a nearby museum, Canadians may lose one of the sources of commitment that built it and continues to sustain it. Christians have reason to speak clearly about that loss, while showing through their care why their neighbours have a stake in the future of faith-based healthcare in Canada.
Ray Pennings is the Executive Vice President and co-founder of Cardus, a leading Canadian think tank, and publisher of Comment magazine. He has worked in politics and punditry, is published on education, law, and theology, and has led the research arm of a labour organisation. He speaks and writes widely and provocatively about God and Canadian public life. Photo credit: CDC on Unsplash.