Address at the Annual Meeting of the Society of St Vincent de Paul
Ellesmere Port, 15th October 2011
This week serious concerns were expressed about the care, or disturbing lack of care, for the elderly in Britain’s hospitals. The Care Quality Commission, after visiting wards in a hundred hospitals, found repeated incidences of helpless patients having calls for assistance ignored and witnessed staff failing to help patients with their most basic need to eat, drink or even wash. It is a truly disturbing picture which has emerged not in all of our hospitals but in too many across the country to assume such indifference is now unusual. Management and nursing practice have been questioned but surely we have need today to ask more searching questions of ourselves in a country where millions of lives have been destroyed in abortion, where human life is routinely experimented upon and discarded and when today pressure grows for what is called “mercy killing” to end the lives of the terminally ill and the aged. So as a society we have need to ask: are we losing that respect and reverence for what Blessed John Paul II called, “the sacred value of human life … the incomparable value of every human person”. (Evangelium Vitae no.2) on which the very ideal of the hospital and the caring professions are founded?
As Pope John Paul foresaw in his 1995 letter, The Gospel of Life, which could almost be speaking of the alarming reports we have heard this week when he pointed to the symptoms of what he called the emerging culture of death where: “prosperous societies … see the growing number of elderly and disabled people as intolerable and too burdensome. These people are very often isolated from their families and by society, which are organised almost exclusively on the basis of productive efficiency, according to which a hopelessly impaired life no longer has any value”. (Evangelium Vitae no. 64). Could it be that we have begun to dismiss the cries of the weakest in the place where they expected to receive the greatest care because their impaired lives no longer seem to have any great value?
How different is that law found written in the human heart (Rom 2: 14-14) and revealed by our faith in Christ who “by his incarnation … united himself in some fashion with every human being” (Gaudium et Spes no.22). The faith which Pope Benedict expressed in these striking words which I often repeat to the young in the diocese: “Only when we meet the living God in Christ do we know what life is. We are not some casual and meaningless product of evolution,” he declared at the beginning of his ministry as the Successor of St Peter, “each of us is willed, each of us is loved, each of us is necessary” (Mass for the Inauguration of the Pontificate 24th April 2005). How differently we begin to see in this light our own lives and the lives of those frailest and most needy in the light of being willed, loved and so needed. This was the vision which first inspired the work of the hospital and the vocation of the medical and caring professions. It is the vision of life, every human life, which led St Vincent de Paul to say: “The service of the poorest is to be preferred to all else and to be performed without delay … above all abandoned persons are given to us (not as burdens) but as lords and patrons (Letter 2546).”
This is the tireless work and witness continued by the Society of St Vincent de Paul and so many of the Church’s voluntary organisations on the streets, the hospital wards and the nursing homes across this country. In those memorable words of Blessed Teresa of Calcutta we go out to meet and serve Christ so often “in his most distressing disguises”. Today I wish to remind you how this witness to the value of every human life, especially the most impaired, is more vital than ever before. For whenever you set out to make your visits to those most isolated and vulnerable in our society it points to what our Holy Father Pope Benedict reminded us of on his visit to the United Kingdom, “As advances in medicine and other factors lead to increased longevity, it is important to recognise the presence of growing numbers of older people as a blessing for society …” so that in the light of the fourth commandment to honour your father and mother, “the provision of care for the elderly should be considered not so much an act of generosity as the repayment of a debt of gratitude”, which brings a reward and promises a blessing for the whole of society (Deut 5:16).
In this Blessed Sacrament of the Eucharist Christ our Lord gives Himself to us “wholly and entirely” under the frail signs of bread and wine. Let us pray for those “eyes of faith” always to recognise His Real Presence here in the Mass, this Blessed Sacrament so we may never lose sight of Him in the frailest and most vulnerable of his brothers and sisters. Amen.