On Thursday, 9 October, Cardinal Vincent Nichols celebrated a special ‘White Mass’ for Catholic healthcare professionals in Westminster Cathedral. It followed the conclusion of a medical symposium in London organised by the charity SOMOS – “we are” in Spanish – a physician-led community care organisation that provides medical care to New York’s Hispanic immigrant communities.
SOMOS has a network of 2,600 healthcare providers serving over 850,000 Medicaid and Medicare beneficiaries in New York City’s immigrant communities.
This is a moment rich in meaning and association. This evening, I welcome you to this great Cathedral and thank you for making such a journey to gather here.
Os doy la bienvenida a esta catedral, lugar de belleza y de oración. Gracias por venir. Gracias por todo vuestro trabajo.
This evening, we celebrate Mass with our minds on the Holy Angels, particularly on our Guardian Angels. These angels are a great demonstration of God’s love for his people, the protectors of each person, for each person who receives from God the gift of life is ‘in the image and likeness of God’ and thereby endowed with an innate dignity.
At the core of SOMOS, as I understand it, is the vision of providing holistic care that you seek to establish and promote for the most vulnerable in the great metropolis of New York. I thank you for this vocation, which is focused on the service, in body and soul, of poor immigrant communities. Somos angeles!
The first reading suggests the profound cooperation between our Heavenly Father and every doctor, each one of you. The text exhorts those who are sick ‘to pray to the Lord and he will heal you’… then ‘let the doctor take over – the Lord created him too – do not let him leave you for you need him … ‘ and ‘For they, in their turn, will pray to the Lord to grant them the grace to relieve and to heal.’ And that is what we do in this celebration of Holy Mass.
In these days, in your country and in mine, we face profound difficulties in sustaining the cohesiveness of society, especially under the pressure created by the arrival of and care for many migrants. Antagonisms surface in hostility, protest, and rejection, even in regard to those who have genuinely fled from violence, persecution, and warfare. Forgetting the past contribution made to our countries and their prosperity by those who arrived in poverty, many in society see new arrivals as no more than a threat. The secular framework in which we live does not have the strong foundations needed for a vision of those who arrive as children of God, blessed with God’s gifts and bringing with them much to contribute.
For this reason, I salute the religious foundation of your movement – SOMOS. I recognise the diversity of your own religious faiths, and I thank your leaders for drawing you into a strong common purpose, rooted, as it is, in a Catholic initiative.
If this drama of responses to immigrants is one of the factors of the culture in which we now live and work, there is another, which is having a profound impact, at least in this country. It is the assumption that we see and understand ourselves primarily as autonomous individuals, gifted above all with the right and freedom to act as we wish, with little or no consideration for the impact of our actions on others.
This claim of the autonomy of the individual is both mistaken and dangerous. It lies behind the drive for publicly assisted suicide, at present being debated and decided in our Parliamentary processes.
We heard recently of a married couple, in their nineties, who were not terminally ill but simply elderly and did not want to face physical decline. They decided, also, not to tell their family and friends until their suicide was done. They did so by means of an email that was received after their deaths. Such was the strength of their conviction of their right to autonomous action.
The anguish that this must have caused is but one symptom of the destructive consequence of a false belief in individual autonomy, and certainly, when it is enshrined in law and becomes part of public policy and provision. State assisted suicide is destructive of family relationships, it undermines the relationship between doctor and patient, it changes dramatically the purpose of medicine and the role of a national health service, which could also extend to being a national death service.
How different is the picture put before us in the Gospel reading we have just heard: friends caring for a sick man, doing everything they can, even dismantling a roof, to bring him to a source of healing, comforting him in his struggle with paralysis, not leaving him to battle on alone.
It is so clear why this Gospel passage is proclaimed to us this evening. Here is a vision of shared responsibility, the recognition that we are sisters and brothers to one another, especially to those in need. This is a truth of our human condition: that we come into this world not as autonomous individuals, but through and into a network of human relationships; that we strive to enlarge and develop those relationships in so many different ways, so as to grow, to deepen our very identity; we work together to contribute to our wider family.
Of course, for some, this network of human relationships are there simply to be exploited for the purposes of crime and deceit and profit. For some, such links are nothing more than a burden to be thrown aside. But for those inspired by a belief in God, the creator and giver of every human life, the struggle to honour and cherish these relationships of human belonging is a key to our true and shared humanity and to the health of every society.
Again, my sisters and brothers, I welcome you here and I salute your initiative, your dedication, and your work.
SOMOS: medics, servants of the sick.
SOMOS: dedicated to the human family in one of its critical struggles of our age.
SOMOS: founded in a rich vision of human dignity, formed and strengthened in your belief in God.
SOMOS: here this evening, placing yourselves before God, expressing this belief and trust in the fullness of the Catholic faith, in which we understand ourselves to be nothing less than the Body of Christ at work in the world. We can give to him our hands, our minds, our hearts, that our work of humble service may bear great fruit.
May God bless you all.
Amen.
